A jewel in South Africa’s ecological crown, the Wild Coast stretches along the nation’s Eastern Cape from the Mtamvuna River in the north to the Great Kei River in the south.

The region is one of South Africa’s last remaining wildernesses, a land of jagged coastline, sandy bays and ancient forests. It is also the ancestral home of the indigenous Xhosa people.

Famous for its natural beauty, tourism and being the birthplace of Nelson Mandela, today the Wild Coast’s reputation is being darkened by the violence associated with mining operations seeking to exploit its rolling dunes.

Since the mid-2000s, Australian mining company Mineral Commodities Limited (MRC) and subsidiary Transworld Energy and Mineral Resources (TEM) have been attempting to mine thousands of tonnes of Ilmenite, Rutile and Zircon from the Wild Coast’s metal-rich sands along a 22-kilometre strip of northern Pondoland, known as Xolobeni.

Standing in the way of MRC’s plans are the indigenous Amadiba community, the majority of whom are vociferously opposed to the mine.

Resistance

Despite MRC’s best-laid plans, active operations at the area earmarked for mining are yet to start due to sustained resistance from the Amadiba community.

Over the past decade, self-organised mass mobilisations of hundreds of Amadiba community members have physically blocked MRC’s attempts to drill in Xolobeni. Local people have also taken their protests to government level, stating in no uncertain terms that MRC does not have their Free Prior and Informed Consent to mine anywhere in their ancestral territory.

Sinegugu Zukulu, a Wild Coast resident and Director of local non-profit organisation Sustaining the Wild Coast, says the majority of the Amadiba community oppose MRC’s proposed mine because of the impacts it will have on the livelihoods and environment in the area.

“People see the mine as threatening their land security”, he says. “It will take away grazing and cropland away from the community, it will take away fishing rights from estuaries, it will take away access to other resources harvested from estuaries due to pollution created by dust from the mine. Mining will disturb hundreds of ancestral graves in the land earmarked for mining and sacred sites on the targeted land are to be destroyed.”

Zukulu’s concerns are backed up by a 2014 report from South Africa’s Eastern Cape Department of Economic Development, Environmental Affairs and Tourism. This found that “surrounding communities are unanimous in their opposition to the mine as it would require moving communities away from the area, destroying their livelihoods in the process, and potentially causing irreparable damage to the surrounding environment.”

However, the prospect of these damages has not convinced everyone to oppose the mine. Whilst the majority’s resistance has been successful in blocking the progress of the Xolobeni project, their efforts to protect land and life have exposed them to harassment, threats, physical assault and murder.

Divide and conquer

According to Ryley Grunenwald, director of The Shore Break, a film that explores the struggle over the Amadiba community’s future, says MRC’s presence in the area has caused deep and increasingly violent social division between the small minority who support the mine and the majority who do not:

“MRC’s local partners, XOLCO, are a minority group who will benefit from the mining and are hell bent to override the majority, who call XOLCO ‘the crooks of the village’. For more than a year there have been violent attacks, night raids and assaults on anti-mining community members.”

XOLCO, which stands for the Xolobeni empowerment company, is one of two community empowerment groups set up by MRC in the Xolobeni area. The other, Blue Bantry, has a 50% shareholding in Mineral Sands Resources (Pty) Ltd‚ which owns the Tormin Mineral Sands project in the Western Cape, and therefore benefits from MRC’s operations.

Zukulu says MRC has intentionally divided the community, targeting leaders in an attempt to weaken community resistance to the mine: “The mining company has co-opted a traditional leader- our Chief – and as a result he may now not resolve the conflict as he is an applicant as well.”

Chief Lunga Baleni, who MRC claims to have consulted over permission to mine in Xolobeni, a traditional leader of the Amadiba People, is a director of XOLCO. Both Baleni and Zamile Qunya, an MRC employee and director of Blue Bantry, are reported to have helped bail out individuals who have attacked anti-mining members of the Amadiba community and to have taken part in attacks themselves.

Since MRC’s arrival on the Wild Coast, opponents of the mine say such attacks have taken four lives and that many others have been injured, creating a climate of fear in the area.

“People are now leaving in fear of being attacked. We have had babies being born in the bush as people sleep there in fear of being attacked”, says Zukulu.

‘You cannot have development without blood’

In what campaigners say is an escalation of the violence facing mining opponents on the Wild Coast, on the 22nd March 2016 Sikosiphi ‘Bazooka’ Radebe was shot in the head eight times and killed in front of his young son.

Up until his death, Mr Radebe was Chairman of the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC), a group formed in 2007 to oppose MRC’s Xolobeni project and claim the environmental rights of the Amadiba community.

Hours before his death, Radebe called fellow ACC member Nonhle Mbuthumba to check on her safety. He told her that he had heard about a ‘hit-list’ that included his name, hers and that of another ACC member, Mzamo Dlamini.

The perpetrators of Radebe’s murder, who posed as police officers on their approach to his home, remain at large.

In a statement released after Radebe’s death, MRC denied any responsibility for violence against opponents of its operations. Despite the testimony of local people and findings by the Department of Economic Development, Environmental Affairs and Tourism this statement also dismissed claims that the majority of local people are opposed to the Xolobeni mine.

MRC has consistently denied playing any role in the conflict that has occurred since by its arrival on the Wild Coast and insists it does not support violence. However, the company has been heavily criticised over its engagement with local communities and for comments made by company employees that have been interpreted as condoning violence against mining opponents at two of its South African mines.

In an email sent to local stakeholder’s at the company’s Tormin mine on South Africa’s Western Cape and obtained by South Africa’s Sunday Times, MRC’s Executive Chairman Mark Caruso is reported to have threatened to “rain down vengeance” on those who opposed the mine:

“From time to time I have sought the Bible for understanding and perhaps I can direct you to Ezekiel 25.17. ‘And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger, those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee’.”

In relation to the Xolobeni project, The Bench Marks Foundation that Mark Caruso’s younger brother and business partner, Patrick, has made similarly disturbing comments.

The group write that at a 2007 community meeting following the murder of community activist Scorpion Dimane, Patrick Caruso responded to the bloodshed that had occurred since MRC’s arrival by saying:

“Well, there is always blood where there are these types of projects … in my experience you cannot have development without blood.”

Protests, petitions and British billionaires

The murder of Bazooka Radebe has intensified international advocacy efforts in support of the Amadiba Crisis Committee in recent weeks, with campaigners exposing and applying pressure to MRC’s connections to the UK and Australia.

In London campaigners from several UK-based organisations gathered on the 5th May to call on British property magnate and mining investor Graham Edwards to help put a stop to violence and killings associated with MRC’s Xolobeni mine.

Leaflets handed out to passers by campaigners highlighted the fact that, as the sole owner and director of AU Mining Limited, Edwards – who doubles as chief executive of UK property giant Telereal Trillium – holds 96 million shares in MRC, amounting to an estimated 23.6% of the company.

Protestors dropped a banner proclaiming “No Mining Amadibaland” from a walkway, read statements from Amadiba community leaders and filmed messages of solidarity outside the central London offices of Edwards’ investment firm Telereal Trillium.

Ahead of MRC’s Annual General Meeting in Australia on 25th of May, the campaigners urged Mr Edwards to listen to the wishes of the majority of the Amadiba community and use his influence within MRC to encourage the company to abandon its conflict-ridden interest in Xolobeni.

Speaking at the protest, Dr Andrew Higginbottom said that if Edwards’ fails to influence MRC to abandon Xolobeni, he should divest and save his reputation from being sullied by association with MRC:

“MRC should respect the wishes of the Amadiba community and walk away. Edwards and his family are the beneficiaries of this mining … he has a moral responsibiilty for MRC’s conduct.”

Last September Edwards (or by another account his wife barrister Georgina Black) bought a luxury property on Sydney’s prestigious Rose Bay waterfront, ‘Indah’, for a reported AU$27 million (see photo).

Another future for Amadibaland

As well as bearing witness to the pain and anger of the Amadiba Community in central London last week, protestors carried with them the hopes of the Amadiba People. These were most succinctly summed up by a placard that read “Graham Edwards, MRC, Hands-Off. Xolobeni is for Farming and Tourism”.

Those who oppose the mine, like the members of the ACC, have an alternative vision for the future of their community, based on sustainable eco-tourism and traditional small-scale agriculture, says Sandy Heather of non-profit organization Sustaining the Wild Coast

“Small-scale community-based eco-tourism and related livelihoods projects – village-based accommodation, hiking trails, school leadership trails- have the potential to provide decent work for approximately 200 people indefinitely whilst respecting ecological integrity”, says Heather.

“The mining will provide approximately 150 low level jobs, which may still be an overstatement, for 22 years, whilst destroying the entire ecological integrity of the area as well as the social, cultural and livelihood fabric.”

Nonhle Mbuthumba, a forthright member of the ACC, is confident that those who oppose MRC’s mine will be victorious. In a statement of solidarity sent to campaigners in London, she wrote:

“There will be no mining on the Wild Coast. There will be life, there will be peace and there will be development supported by the people.”

Action: Protest at MRC’s annual shareholders meeting in Subiaco, Western Australia, on 25th May 2016.

Hal Rhoades is Communications and Advocacy Officer at The Gaia Foundation which is working with communities resisting unwanted mining operations in KwaZulu Natal and worldwide. He is also a regular contributor to Intercontinental Cry.

Sign the AVAAZ petition to ask Graham Edwards to divest from MRC.

Watch The Shore Break, Ryley Grunenwald’s film documenting the struggle over the future of the Amadiba community and South Africa’s Wild Coast.

Fracking company Infrastrata has begun to move drilling equipment into a Northern Ireland woodland that contains a cascade of three reservoirs providing drinking water to Belfast and nearby Carrickfergus.

Two of the reservoirs served by the Woodburn catchment are Areas of Special Scientific Interest – the NI equivalent of SSSIs elsewhere in the UK.

The Woodburn Forest shale drilling site lies just 380m from the nearest reservoir – and lies on land that belongs to Northern Ireland Water, the Province’s monopoly water company. Homes are as close as 200m away.

NI Water recently granted a 50-year oil & gas lease to Infrastrata claiming that the fracking posed ‘no danger’ to drinking water supplies. It is believed to be the first time ever that a public water company has leased land for fossil fuel extraction in a protected water catchment.

A Freedom of Information request by local anti-fracking group Stop the Drill has revealed that water from the North Woodburn reservoir supplies Dorisland Water Works which then feeds water to over 1,800 streets – meaning many tens of thousands of homes.

‘Permitted development’ fast track planning

No planning permission has been granted for the development – but the company and the Northern Ireland Department of Environment (NIDE) say it does not need it as the construction of the exploratory well falls under ‘permitted development’ rights linked to oil and gas exploration.

Planners at the local authority, Mid & East Antrim Council, and at NIDE, could have rescinded any claimed permitted development rights. However they failed to respond within the required 21-day period following notification so the company’s permitted development went through on the nod.

The Department could also have forced Infrastrata to submit a full planning application even after the 21-day period expired but chose not to do so in spite of a public consultation in which the development was strongly opposed.

A drilling rig turned up at the site on Monday this week even though the proposal is currently being challenged in the courts via a judicial review by a local resident. Permission for the case to proceed was granted on Friday last week.

Local residents will be back in court tomorrow to seek an injunction against the water firm to compel them to cease and desist from the proposed installation and drilling works.

Local people win international support for campaign

Local resident Mark Chapman was arrested by police for obstruction on Monday as he tried to prevent the equipment moving onto site by climbing onto a drill at Woodburn Forest. He has since been released on police bail.

Prior to his arrest Mr Chapman won the applause of other protestors at the site when he announced: “I’m upholding environmental law. My understanding is that it is possible to commit a small crime to prevent a larger one.”

Friends of the Earth campaigners from thirty countries are also visiting the site today in an act of solidarity with local people. Friends of the Earth Europe Director, Magda Stoczkiewicz, commented:

“We couldn’t in all conscience sit in Carlingford discussing how to build a fossil-free future while just up the road a fossil fuel company is riding roughshod over community concerns in pursuit of the last drop of oil and gas. Standing in solidarity with the local people of Woodburn, who are fighting to protect their water, their forest and our climate, is simple necessity.”

Jagoda Munic, chair of Friends of the Earth International, added: “I’m glad to be able stand shoulder to shoulder with the community in Woodburn. We simply can’t afford to open up any new areas to fossil fuel extraction.”

In March this year Hollywood actor Mark Ruffalo, who recently played superhero The Incredible Hulk, wrote to the Northern Ireland Executive over the issue citing “concerning facts” about the case.

Ruffalo is also founder of Water Defense, an environmental campaign group committed to protecting fresh water supplies from pollution by oil and gas development and other industrial activites. 

Facebook: Don’t Drill Antrim Water.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor at The Ecologist.

‘Environmental racism’ is a concept it’s hard to imagine environmentalism ever having done without.

It names a reality that can’t be tackled ‘before’ or ‘after’ environmental campaigning, but has to be confronted every day in building movements against the ways oppressive societies organize nature.

Blowing a hole in the attitude, widespread among middle-class environmentalists, that “I’m not a racist, so don’t talk to me about racism”, the concept highlights the ways that nice guys without racist theories participate in racism, too – not only when they disregard the extent to which pollution flows toward black and brown people and away from whites, but also when they obey the rules of polite society that tend to forbid even raising such uncomfortable issues.

Cities and forests

The idea of environmental racism grew up in the US in the 1980s among minority groups who were being forced to incorporate into their bodies huge quantities of poisons from chemical or nuclear waste dumps, municipal landfills, polluting power plants, incinerators, pesticide-laden air or lead-laden water.

What US groups were describing, of course, was going on all over the world. In 1984, both the Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, India and the PEMEX liquid propane gas plant in Mexico City blew up, blighting a million lives. Not long after, the enormously toxic work of dismantling obsolete computers began to fall mostly on cheap Asian and African labour.

Environmental racism of this kind had also long been obvious in forests. Between 1964 and 1992, Texaco subjected tens of thousands of indigenous and peasant (largely mestizo) Ecuadorians to an intensity of pollution from its Lago Agrio oil fields that would never have been tolerated in the wealthy white suburbs of New York City.

In the 1990s, indigenous communities worldwide began to be ‘assigned’ the job of using their forests and paramos to help absorb the carbon-dioxide pollution flowing from industries whose profits disproportionately benefit other ethnic groups.

From the US to the Democratic Republic of Congo

In fact, for every example of environmental racism in cities, another example can probably be found in forests.

US environmental justice movements have long pointed out the racism inherent in the way some big Washington, DC-based environmental organizations fall all over themselves to give superficial green makeovers to industries whose profits remain based in part on the unequal distribution of pollution within the country.

But isn’t it racist in precisely the same way for, say, the UK government’s development finance arm, the CDC Group, to invest public money in the Feronia oil palm company in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Feronia’s precarious business could not be sustained if it did not occupy forest lands that were stolen from communities along the Congo River under Belgian colonial occupation between 1908 and 1960.

Given the persistent legacy of malnutrition and dependence on poverty wages that continues to affect local people, isn’t it racist for CDC to claim that it is only trying to “improve a situation” that it has “inherited”, has no responsibility for, and can do nothing about?

Another dimension to environmental racism

But environmental racism isn’t just about the racialized distribution of pre-existing pollution or pre-existing nature. It’s also about the ways people, ethnic groups, nature and pollution are co-defined in the first place. And this aspect of environmental racism is perhaps even more visible in the forests than elsewhere.

For example, REDD is racist not just because it grabs indigenous people’s land to clean up non-indigenous carbon dioxide emissions. It’s also racist because it discriminates against indigenous ideas of land. Indigenous understandings of forests are not even dismissed, because they are not even recognized as existing.

A similar racism is inherent in what Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa calls “zones of sacrifice”, where indigenous valuations of land are ignored as obstacles to the commodity export economy.

Or take the ‘nature’ that is preserved in countless protected areas worldwide. From the time of the establishment of the US’s Yellowstone National Park onwards, this is a nature that depends on the exclusion of indigenous peoples. Innumerable relationships among humans, animals and plants are banned and replaced with new relationships involving wildlife managers, academic researchers, forest rangers, tourists and broadcasters.

In essence, such transformations are nothing new. In medieval England, the words ‘park’ and ‘forest’ signified places where there were deer set aside for royal elites to hunt, not necessarily places where there were trees. But post-Yellowstone practice added new twists. Elites pretended to erase themselves from the scene by claiming to be representatives of nonhuman ‘nature’. Yet the word ‘protected’ in ‘protected areas’ still meant little more than ‘protected from the uneducated and dark-skinned’.

Of course, under progressive regimes, some ‘natives’ were allowed back inside such ‘natures’. But in the process they usually had to agree to convert themselves into either picturesque ‘noble savages’ or agents of Western ecological management.

For example, they might have to dichotomize their land into permanent agricultural fields and agriculture-free forests, leaving no room for other forms such as forest fallows. Such natures remained inescapably racist. Fighting the human / nature binary that defined them became a part of fighting racism more generally.

Stereotyped natures

And hasn’t racism always gone hand in hand with prejudicial ideas of nature as lying somehow outside and beneath the human?

Isn’t it more than a coincidence, for example, that the derogatory connotations of many words for ‘forest’ resonate with the racist tone of terms often applied to marginalized minority groups?

In Thailand, where racist conservationism has often advocated programmes to resettle highland minorities away from watershed forests, thuen (jungle) is just another word for ‘outlaw’, and paa (forest) is that which is not siwilai (civilized). How many racist epithets from around the world – indios de mierda, khon thuen, nyika, spruce monkey, kariang, jangli, jungle bunny – do not implicitly locate their referents in precisely such stereotyped zones of forest primitivity?

To know how to live in and with such purportedly ‘savage’ environments – to have the skills to vary, extend, enrich or interact with them without simply reducing them to resources for infinite growth – has frequently been assumed to diminish your humanity.

Among European colonialist thinkers like John Locke, Native Americans were not felt to be capable of adding any human ingredients to land at all. In colonial India, ‘waste’ lands were seen to be occupied by ‘criminal’ people. Today, the Asian Development Bank is on record claiming that it is only by removing people from forested mountain areas that they can be brought to “normal life”.

Science and responsibility

This leads straight to a perhaps even more uncomfortable question. If certain natures are racist, then can the sciences that study them be innocent?

The reality of science is that it can’t call everything into question at the same time. It has to stand on certain assumptions which for the time being are not challenged, in order to test other things. As of 2016, a racist human / nature dichotomy is often one of those assumptions.

For example, an environmental science whose problems are shaped by a fixed agenda of ‘reducing the impact of humans on nature’ or ‘determining carrying capacity’ is going to be racially biased regardless of the intentions of the scientists who practice it.

Yet sciences that study things like ‘Yellowstone nature’ can’t remain free forever from the responsibility to question – scientifically – the very construction of what they investigate. Today it is widely recognized that an anthropology that treats the peoples it studies as static museum pieces to be ‘protected’ from change is racist. But isn’t restoration ecology racist in precisely the same way? And what about climate models seeking ways of ‘stabilizing’ global temperatures at economically optimal levels?

Of course, few scientists brave enough to challenge racist axioms inside their own discipline are seen by their colleagues as acting out of the scientific spirit to which they have dedicated their lives. Instead they are interpreted as engaging in personal attacks and sowing divisiveness. Racism, they are told, is never anything more than some individual bad guys behaving immorally or unprofessionally, whereas science itself, being about ‘nature’, is ‘race-blind’.

This reaction is widespread partly because it has been so effective in defending the prestige of the scientific class and those whose power science legitimates. But at bottom it’s merely one more restatement of the same human / nature division. It’s as much an obstacle to rational discussion as racial epithets themselves.

Discomfort or movement-building?

Are forest activists ready to entertain the idea that certain concepts of nature and forest that help define the work not only of many scientists, but also of organizations like the World Bank, the FAO, the UNFCCC, UNESCO and CIFOR, are in some ways on a par with nigger? Are activists willing to challenge the way they themselves sometimes use these terms?

Stretching the concept of environmental racism in this way is bound to stir widespread resistance, if not hysteria. Among professional classes, as the US legal scholar Patricia J. Williams noted years ago, “matters of race are resented and repressed in much the same way as matters of sex and scandal: the subject is considered a rude and transgressive one in mixed company.”

But perhaps those discomfited by the topic will just have to get over themselves. For centuries, indigenous and forest peoples and peasants have had to withstand the racism of having human / nature binaries imposed wholesale on them and their forests.

For middle-class environmentalists and others to have to work through a little temporary discomfort is nothing by comparison. Particularly when the potential gains are so disproportionate. When, at the recent UN Paris climate summit, some young African-American activists working against environmental racism in the US encountered representatives of the ‘No REDD in Africa’ coalition, the rapport was immediate and electric. Part of this may have been due simply to different aspects of a shared global environmental history suddenly falling into place.

But perhaps it also owed something to a sense that older concepts of racial oppression and liberation were being extended, and that surprising new things might be on the verge of happening.

Here was the kind of moment from which transformation flows. Movement-building is concept-building.

Larry Lohmann is a former editor of The Ecologist and cofounder of The Corner House think tank, which occupies the former Ecologist offices in Sturminster Newton. He may be reached at larrylohmann@gn.apc.org.

This article was originally published in the World Rainforest Movement’s Bulletin 223 and the original may be read here. It is also available in PDF form in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

More reading

Larry Lohmann, ‘Ethnic Discrimination in Global Conservation‘.

Larry Lohmann, ‘Forest Cleansing: Racial Oppression in Scientific Nature Conservation‘.

Larry Lohmann, ‘For Reasons of Nature: Ethnic Discrimination and Conservation in Thailand‘.

John Vidal, ‘UK Development Finance Arm Accused of Bankrolling ‘Agro-Colonialism’ in Congo‘.

Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination, University of British Columbia Press, 2005.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human, University of California Press, 2013.

Stephen Corry, ‘The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks‘.

Stephen Corry, ‘The myth of the ‘brutal savage’ and the mindset of conquest‘, The Ecologist.

Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race, Virago, 1997.

Maristella Svampa, ‘The ‘Commodities Consensus’ and Valuation Languages in Latin America‘, Alternautas, July 2015.

‘Environmental racism’ is a concept it’s hard to imagine environmentalism ever having done without.

It names a reality that can’t be tackled ‘before’ or ‘after’ environmental campaigning, but has to be confronted every day in building movements against the ways oppressive societies organize nature.

Blowing a hole in the attitude, widespread among middle-class environmentalists, that “I’m not a racist, so don’t talk to me about racism”, the concept highlights the ways that nice guys without racist theories participate in racism, too – not only when they disregard the extent to which pollution flows toward black and brown people and away from whites, but also when they obey the rules of polite society that tend to forbid even raising such uncomfortable issues.

Cities and forests

The idea of environmental racism grew up in the US in the 1980s among minority groups who were being forced to incorporate into their bodies huge quantities of poisons from chemical or nuclear waste dumps, municipal landfills, polluting power plants, incinerators, pesticide-laden air or lead-laden water.

What US groups were describing, of course, was going on all over the world. In 1984, both the Union Carbide chemical factory in Bhopal, India and the PEMEX liquid propane gas plant in Mexico City blew up, blighting a million lives. Not long after, the enormously toxic work of dismantling obsolete computers began to fall mostly on cheap Asian and African labour.

Environmental racism of this kind had also long been obvious in forests. Between 1964 and 1992, Texaco subjected tens of thousands of indigenous and peasant (largely mestizo) Ecuadorians to an intensity of pollution from its Lago Agrio oil fields that would never have been tolerated in the wealthy white suburbs of New York City.

In the 1990s, indigenous communities worldwide began to be ‘assigned’ the job of using their forests and paramos to help absorb the carbon-dioxide pollution flowing from industries whose profits disproportionately benefit other ethnic groups.

From the US to the Democratic Republic of Congo

In fact, for every example of environmental racism in cities, another example can probably be found in forests.

US environmental justice movements have long pointed out the racism inherent in the way some big Washington, DC-based environmental organizations fall all over themselves to give superficial green makeovers to industries whose profits remain based in part on the unequal distribution of pollution within the country.

But isn’t it racist in precisely the same way for, say, the UK government’s development finance arm, the CDC Group, to invest public money in the Feronia oil palm company in the Democratic Republic of Congo?

Feronia’s precarious business could not be sustained if it did not occupy forest lands that were stolen from communities along the Congo River under Belgian colonial occupation between 1908 and 1960.

Given the persistent legacy of malnutrition and dependence on poverty wages that continues to affect local people, isn’t it racist for CDC to claim that it is only trying to “improve a situation” that it has “inherited”, has no responsibility for, and can do nothing about?

Another dimension to environmental racism

But environmental racism isn’t just about the racialized distribution of pre-existing pollution or pre-existing nature. It’s also about the ways people, ethnic groups, nature and pollution are co-defined in the first place. And this aspect of environmental racism is perhaps even more visible in the forests than elsewhere.

For example, REDD is racist not just because it grabs indigenous people’s land to clean up non-indigenous carbon dioxide emissions. It’s also racist because it discriminates against indigenous ideas of land. Indigenous understandings of forests are not even dismissed, because they are not even recognized as existing.

A similar racism is inherent in what Argentine sociologist Maristella Svampa calls “zones of sacrifice”, where indigenous valuations of land are ignored as obstacles to the commodity export economy.

Or take the ‘nature’ that is preserved in countless protected areas worldwide. From the time of the establishment of the US’s Yellowstone National Park onwards, this is a nature that depends on the exclusion of indigenous peoples. Innumerable relationships among humans, animals and plants are banned and replaced with new relationships involving wildlife managers, academic researchers, forest rangers, tourists and broadcasters.

In essence, such transformations are nothing new. In medieval England, the words ‘park’ and ‘forest’ signified places where there were deer set aside for royal elites to hunt, not necessarily places where there were trees. But post-Yellowstone practice added new twists. Elites pretended to erase themselves from the scene by claiming to be representatives of nonhuman ‘nature’. Yet the word ‘protected’ in ‘protected areas’ still meant little more than ‘protected from the uneducated and dark-skinned’.

Of course, under progressive regimes, some ‘natives’ were allowed back inside such ‘natures’. But in the process they usually had to agree to convert themselves into either picturesque ‘noble savages’ or agents of Western ecological management.

For example, they might have to dichotomize their land into permanent agricultural fields and agriculture-free forests, leaving no room for other forms such as forest fallows. Such natures remained inescapably racist. Fighting the human / nature binary that defined them became a part of fighting racism more generally.

Stereotyped natures

And hasn’t racism always gone hand in hand with prejudicial ideas of nature as lying somehow outside and beneath the human?

Isn’t it more than a coincidence, for example, that the derogatory connotations of many words for ‘forest’ resonate with the racist tone of terms often applied to marginalized minority groups?

In Thailand, where racist conservationism has often advocated programmes to resettle highland minorities away from watershed forests, thuen (jungle) is just another word for ‘outlaw’, and paa (forest) is that which is not siwilai (civilized). How many racist epithets from around the world – indios de mierda, khon thuen, nyika, spruce monkey, kariang, jangli, jungle bunny – do not implicitly locate their referents in precisely such stereotyped zones of forest primitivity?

To know how to live in and with such purportedly ‘savage’ environments – to have the skills to vary, extend, enrich or interact with them without simply reducing them to resources for infinite growth – has frequently been assumed to diminish your humanity.

Among European colonialist thinkers like John Locke, Native Americans were not felt to be capable of adding any human ingredients to land at all. In colonial India, ‘waste’ lands were seen to be occupied by ‘criminal’ people. Today, the Asian Development Bank is on record claiming that it is only by removing people from forested mountain areas that they can be brought to “normal life”.

Science and responsibility

This leads straight to a perhaps even more uncomfortable question. If certain natures are racist, then can the sciences that study them be innocent?

The reality of science is that it can’t call everything into question at the same time. It has to stand on certain assumptions which for the time being are not challenged, in order to test other things. As of 2016, a racist human / nature dichotomy is often one of those assumptions.

For example, an environmental science whose problems are shaped by a fixed agenda of ‘reducing the impact of humans on nature’ or ‘determining carrying capacity’ is going to be racially biased regardless of the intentions of the scientists who practice it.

Yet sciences that study things like ‘Yellowstone nature’ can’t remain free forever from the responsibility to question – scientifically – the very construction of what they investigate. Today it is widely recognized that an anthropology that treats the peoples it studies as static museum pieces to be ‘protected’ from change is racist. But isn’t restoration ecology racist in precisely the same way? And what about climate models seeking ways of ‘stabilizing’ global temperatures at economically optimal levels?

Of course, few scientists brave enough to challenge racist axioms inside their own discipline are seen by their colleagues as acting out of the scientific spirit to which they have dedicated their lives. Instead they are interpreted as engaging in personal attacks and sowing divisiveness. Racism, they are told, is never anything more than some individual bad guys behaving immorally or unprofessionally, whereas science itself, being about ‘nature’, is ‘race-blind’.

This reaction is widespread partly because it has been so effective in defending the prestige of the scientific class and those whose power science legitimates. But at bottom it’s merely one more restatement of the same human / nature division. It’s as much an obstacle to rational discussion as racial epithets themselves.

Discomfort or movement-building?

Are forest activists ready to entertain the idea that certain concepts of nature and forest that help define the work not only of many scientists, but also of organizations like the World Bank, the FAO, the UNFCCC, UNESCO and CIFOR, are in some ways on a par with nigger? Are activists willing to challenge the way they themselves sometimes use these terms?

Stretching the concept of environmental racism in this way is bound to stir widespread resistance, if not hysteria. Among professional classes, as the US legal scholar Patricia J. Williams noted years ago, “matters of race are resented and repressed in much the same way as matters of sex and scandal: the subject is considered a rude and transgressive one in mixed company.”

But perhaps those discomfited by the topic will just have to get over themselves. For centuries, indigenous and forest peoples and peasants have had to withstand the racism of having human / nature binaries imposed wholesale on them and their forests.

For middle-class environmentalists and others to have to work through a little temporary discomfort is nothing by comparison. Particularly when the potential gains are so disproportionate. When, at the recent UN Paris climate summit, some young African-American activists working against environmental racism in the US encountered representatives of the ‘No REDD in Africa’ coalition, the rapport was immediate and electric. Part of this may have been due simply to different aspects of a shared global environmental history suddenly falling into place.

But perhaps it also owed something to a sense that older concepts of racial oppression and liberation were being extended, and that surprising new things might be on the verge of happening.

Here was the kind of moment from which transformation flows. Movement-building is concept-building.

Larry Lohmann is a former editor of The Ecologist and cofounder of The Corner House think tank, which occupies the former Ecologist offices in Sturminster Newton. He may be reached at larrylohmann@gn.apc.org.

This article was originally published in the World Rainforest Movement’s Bulletin 223 and the original may be read here. It is also available in PDF form in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

More reading

Larry Lohmann, ‘Ethnic Discrimination in Global Conservation‘.

Larry Lohmann, ‘Forest Cleansing: Racial Oppression in Scientific Nature Conservation‘.

Larry Lohmann, ‘For Reasons of Nature: Ethnic Discrimination and Conservation in Thailand‘.

John Vidal, ‘UK Development Finance Arm Accused of Bankrolling ‘Agro-Colonialism’ in Congo‘.

Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination, University of British Columbia Press, 2005.

Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human, University of California Press, 2013.

Stephen Corry, ‘The Colonial Origins of Conservation: The Disturbing History Behind US National Parks‘.

Stephen Corry, ‘The myth of the ‘brutal savage’ and the mindset of conquest‘, The Ecologist.

Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Colour-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race, Virago, 1997.

Maristella Svampa, ‘The ‘Commodities Consensus’ and Valuation Languages in Latin America‘, Alternautas, July 2015.

Now forget the nearly extinct pink river dolphin of the Amazon. Forget the panda that is endangered (partly because of a practically absent sex drive).

Forget Lonesome George the tortoise who was the symbol for conservation efforts all around the world. He died alone in 2012.

There is one species that so far has escaped the scrutiny of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) of categorizing all species and that is us.

Homo sapiens.

Now, you might say: there are approaching 7.5 billion people on earth and you could hardly call that a critically low number. And you are right the number is not critically low. It is critically high.
It has been growing exponentially since the 18th century as can been seen in the picture below. And this is exactly where the problem lies…

Exponential growth in a biological system occurs when the number of organisms in a culture increases exponentially until an essential nutrient is exhausted.

You probably remember the experiments from biology class, where you would grow cultures of bacteria on a petri dish. If you don’t remember, or haven’t done the experiment, just watch the exponential growth of E.coli. The colony grows rapidly in the petri dish up until it has depleted all the food.

Then it dies.

Well, we humans are on a petri dish as well. It is called earth. Resources on our petri dish are finite by definition and we are consuming them at high speed. On top we are polluting our petri dish and we have placed it in on a burner …

Now we all, to some extent, perceive that the heat is on. We know that we are under severe stress for survival. We know that we are caged like the E. coli.

For some reason the IUCN has placed the fate of Homo sapiens outside their systems of thinking, when defining the criteria for Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable Species. IUCN has failed to recognize the fact that populations both have an upper and a lower critical threshold for species survival.

But, I didn’t know…

It is not like we have not been warned. We have been warned on different levels:

We have been made aware of the problems on our crowded petri dish by numerous leading scientists, such as the Australian scientist Professor Frank Fenner, who helped to wipe out smallpox. He predicts humans will probably be extinct within 100 years, because of overpopulation, environmental destruction and climate change.

We have been warned about the dangers of climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over and over again.

Now, I must admit that these warnings are not my field of expertise. But I know that large parts of humanity tend to value religion over science, so I figured it makes sense to mention some of the religious warnings. (Honestly, I can’t believe that I just looked this up, but hey … all for the good cause).

Jesus for instance, warned for doomsday on numerous occasions, such as written in the Bible Matthew 24: 4-14.
The Quran states in 47:18: “Are they waiting until the Hour comes to them suddenly? All the signs thereof have already come. Once the Hour comes to them, how will they benefit from their message?”

then there’s cultural warnings. In popular culture many stories, movies or songs are available that address the ‘state of the world’. Some of these works have specifically made to communicate in an accessible, understandable way. We have:

• Popular scientific books like the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond;
• An almost unlimited list of Apocalyptical movies
• The brilliant trash metal CD by Megadeth, Countdown to Extinction, where Dave Mustaine has vocalized the quite formidable words:

  All are gone, all but one.
  No contest, nowhere to run.
  No more left, only one
  
  (Just think of being the only one left, like Lonesome George.)

But, I don’t care …

Now, what I don’t understand is our collective inertia. It seems that there are two dominant states of mind.

We have around 3 billion people who are in direct survival mode, because their living standards are below the poverty line or because they are living in a war struck region. I don’t think you can blame those people for not looking further ahead than tomorrow.

But there is no excuse for the remaining 4.5 billion people, who seem to have collectively stuck their heads in the sand like ostriches. These 4.5 billion people is us.

We let our governments sign fancy treaties like the COP21 in Paris, with (semi) clear targets and goals. We have let them sign treaties many times, but we have done nothing when the governments failed to deliver. Maybe we have uttered some protests, but we went back to normal soon. Planning our holiday to a sunny destination.

We let our companies conduct fraudulent business like the Volkswagen Diesel-gate. Again we uttered some complains, we might even consider boycotting Volkswagen. But we will happily buy a new car by another producer.

What’s next?

As far as I can tell, there are three scenarios:

1. Continue in the halfhearted way that we are doing now. Making promises for the better, but not keeping them. We could make ourselves believe that there is another petri dish out there called Mars, like Elon Musk seems to think.
2. Acknowledge our problems and openly declare that we don’t give a shit. Après nous, le déluge. In this case, we can throw all climate change and population growth curbing actions overboard. ‘Enrich’ our drinking water with Crystal Meth. Organize the Olympic Fossil Fuel Burning Games. After all, we only have 95 years to go till our extinction. We might as well spend those 95 years partying.
3. We could just get our act together. Decide what actions to take and stick to them. We are entitled to change the system. It’s not the governments’ system, or the markets’ system. The system is ours. Just like the planet is the house of our children.

Now, do we REALLY need to vote on this….?

Willemijn Heideman is a Quality and Improvement Manager, EcoLogical Thinker & Professional Questioner based in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Author’s note: I highly appreciate comments on my article. If you liked it, please SHARE this article with your network by clicking on the LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter buttons!

© Willemijn Heideman, 2016. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without written permission from this author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Willemijn Heideman with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. This article was originally published via Linked-in.

The Green Party of England and Wales (GPEW) has been through a roller-coaster couple of years.

There was the Green Surge: the astounding quintupling of our membership, which, despite the UK’s antiquated and anti-democratic electoral system, put us in contention at the General Election for the first time ever, and eventually got us into the televised election debates, on a wave of popular support.

There were also Natalie Bennett’s media meltdowns. There was the General Election result: a quadrupling of our vote – but no extra seats, because of that pathetic electoral system that we labour under.

And then there was the utterly unexpected ascension to power of Jeremy Corbyn. And that is what explains why, with a membership incomparably larger than we’ve ever had before, we failed to move forward at this May’s elections.

The election results: half full or half empty?

Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty for the Green Party of England & Wales to celebrate at these elections. The unappealing Labour and Conservative mayoral candidates were often bested in the campaign by our excellent Sian Berry, who went on to record the best ever Green Party result for London mayor.

We gained Council seats in various places, notably off Conservative incumbents (I’ll come back to this point). And our sister party in the neighbouring nation of Scotland, whose politics are now very disaligned from England’s, had of course a wonderful night, gaining four seats.

On the negative side of the ledger, we failed to move forward in the London Assembly, failed to break through onto the Welsh Assembly, and went backwards in some of our historic and recent powerbases. Strikingly, we failed to advance in both Cambridge and (most crucially, given that it is our best prospect for a parliamentary gain in 2020) Bristol, and we had a bad night, losing seats in Oxford and in Norwich. In all these cases, we lost out to Labour.

We have a horribly divided Government, which is easily the ungreenest Government ever. We have a horribly divided Labour Party, which lost seats rather than gaining them last Thursday, unprecedentedly within over a generation, for an Opposition at this point in the electoral cycle. We have several times more members than we have ever had in comparable elections.

And yet, on balance, the GPEW made no progress last Thursday.

This Green failure to advance is a tragedy, at the current time – a time when we have our last hopes of being able to head off climate chaos. Now is a time in human history that most desperately needs a strong and rapidly growing Green influence on Government. But it’s far from happening, here in Britain.

The immediate reason why is Corbyn, and our flawed response to him, thus far.

The forward march of the Green Party halted?

To see what I mean, let’s go back to the #GreenSurge. How did it happen? Well, one vital part of the story is that, for it to be possible for the Green Party to expand its ‘mainstream’ appeal, we had to break once and for all the stereotype of only being interested in fluffy bunnies and in recycling.

We had to succeed in getting people to understand that being and seeing green politically didn’t mean only caring about ‘the environment’; it meant (and means) caring about social justice and equality and public services too. And at last, in the last few years, we succeeded in doing this. For this achievement, Caroline Lucas and Natalie Bennett must take a good chunk of the credit.

It was a crucial achievement – because it gave us the chance of winning over for the first time huge numbers of former LibDem and Labour voters. When opportunity knocked, as the broadcasters sought to exclude us from the TV debates, a wave of sympathy converted into unprecedented membership growth, and (briefly) double digits in the opinion polls.

But therein lies our current problem. The situation has been transformed by the election of Corbyn as Labour Leader. The ‘left wing’ ground that we owned during the Green Surge has been grabbed from under us, by the unexpected arrival of the most left wing Labour Leader ever.

Attacks on him by the right wing press only feed this situation: in last Thursday’s election, Greens suffered because many of our natural potential supporters voted out of a sense of sympathy or solidarity for Corbyn’s Labour – never mind the fact that most Labour Councillors and MPs can’t wait to be rid of Corbyn. That’s a subtlety that doesn’t affect lots of voters, or that possibly even just feeds the sympathy further!

Why calling ourselves ‘Left’ is no good for Greens

So our problem now, as Greens, can be starkly stated. Identifying ourselves primarily as a party of the ‘Left’ simply won’t work any more.

This has been obvious for some time, as I pointed out last year in the New Statesman and (jointly with Jenny Jones) on IB Times. Unfortunately, however, the Green Party has mostly not yet adapted, to deal with this new reality. What then is the solution? It’s this: we need to develop our ‘USP’. We need to clearly and categorically distinguish ourselves from Labour.

How do we do that? We need to go back to basics. Having successfully established at last that we’re a party that’s strong on equality and social justice and defending public services and fighting cuts, we need to give people a compelling reason to vote for us rather than for (Corbyn’s) Labour.

And that compelling reason simply cannot possibly be: ‘We’re strong on equality and social justice and public services’. Because not only does that not distinguish us form Labour any more, worse still, it encourages the thought that there’s no need to vote Green any more, now that Corbyn leads Labour. It fights worse than weakly, because it fights on, and reinforces, Labour’s home ground.

The project of outflanking Labour on the Left, a project that has in many ways been valid for as long as many of us have been politically active, is no longer tenable. In the Corbyn era, we can only beat Labour by giving people a distinct, ecological, green vision, including the promise of a better quality of life, rather than merely, as the other Parties (including Labour) do, a larger quantity of stuff / money.

That’s the key: ecology, and quality of life.

Beyond ‘growth’

At the heart of this big picture is the need to slay the tired old dragon of economic growthism. Of the obsession, which everyone from Corbyn to Cameron is equally bought into, of (above all) targetting an increase in this utterly out of date number, GDP. The hegemonic shibboleth of economic growth needs to be challenged, and displaced.

The pie can’t keep growing bigger, because the ingredients are running out. Instead, we need to share the existing pie better. Growthism is an excuse for not sharing enough. The promise of being able to redistribute a bit of a larger pie is an excuse, moreover, for an economy the vast majority of the proceeds of which accrue to the rich.

Economic growth is not making us happier; on the contrary. As The Spirit Level has taught us, it is in fact making us less happy, fuelling as it does rising inequality.

In a rich country like Britain, we don’t need more stuff. We don’t need more things, more consumables, or more money. Instead, we need more community. More leisure time. More meaning in our lives. (Plus, as I’ve said, we need to share out the money and stuff rather better.)

Jobs, jobs, jobs?

What about jobs? Isn’t growth needed, in order to provide jobs? No. We should share out the work we have, more: it is absurd that, living in the most overworked country in Europe, we still have many unemployed.

We should organise a just transition, a green transition, a real Green New Deal. But this means shifting jobs from the ‘grey’, polluting economy to the energies and industries of the future. By all means, please let’s have ‘green growth’ in the renewables sector; but we need to shrink the fossil sector, at the same time. So there’s no case for net green growth across the economy; on the contrary.

Finally on this question about jobs, consider a radical green notion: what’s so great about jobs, anyway? Ought we all to be working full time, forever? Whatever happened to ‘the leisure society‘? Are jobs for the sake of it to be welcomed? Even if they are pointless, ‘make-work’, or indeed destructive – as many jobs in our present economy are?

Consider in this connection Corbyn’s ludicrous make-work proposal to keep the Trident nuclear subs, only without their carrying nuclear weapons – a proposal made to paper over the rift within civil war-stricken Labour, by proposing something that everyone in Labour can like: the keeping of some jobs. This shows Labourism’s ‘work for the sake of it’ mentality at its worst.

The Green vision is of a future that sees us all working less (except for the unemployed, who will, obviously, find it easier to find employment if the work is shared out more.). A key ingredient of that vision is a Citizens Income (CI) to replace the morass of benefits we currently have with a radically simplified system that enables everyone, unconditionally, to live.

And that ends wage slavery and the benefits and unemployment traps; and that, because of the security it brings people, will fuel an explosion in volunteering and in social and economic entrepreneurship.

The Citizens Income vs the Living Wage

Now, it’s true that John McDonnell is wanting to explore Labour adopting the Citizens Income, a signature Green policy, as Labour Party policy. Great. I wish him luck. But I’d bet heavily that he won’t succeed. Labour will not go into the next election with CI as its policy.

Why? The clue’s in the name. It’s the Labour Party. It essentially exists to get a fair deal for those who work for a living; it will never take the risk of signing up to what the Daily Mail et al will probably call a ‘shirkers charter’ – CI. The signature policy for such a Party, a Labour Party, is: a decent minimum wage. So Labour under Corbyn-McDonnell will get into a long struggle with Osborne over the level at which the Living Wage (LW) should be set.

The Green Party must opt out of any bidding war over the level at which to set the LW. For two reasons:

• First, because the promise to raise the Living Wage always higher than Labour will offer to, as current Green Party policy in effect tries to promise, is a dagger pointed at the heart of our prospects of winning over the votes of SMEs. A really high LW is unaffordable, a kind of tax on work.
• And second, because we have something better. The visionary policy of the CI is an alternative to the LW. (It is of course economic illiteracy to have both; part of the raison d’etre of CI is to make it possible for any organisation to offer employment to anyone at whatever rate that person wishes to work, or indeed at no rate at all: because everyone has their basic needs satisfied already by the CI alone.

This will be vital to the future of ethical businesses, non-profits, political parties, alternative media, etc. CI is an alternative whose advantages are manifold and manifest, in this era of precarity and automation where the idea of a Labour Party is increasingly anachronistic.

So, this is a key example of our vision for a very different society than Labour wants. A more equal, less job-obsessed, happier society living within ecological limits.

The tide is rising

Arguing for this isn’t simple. It requires some willingness to think ahead a little, and to think outside of the box. It requires some received unwisdom to be questioned. It pits us against assumptions among ‘mainstream’ journalists and economists – assumptions that the ongoing financial crisis and the worsening long climate crisis are showing to be worthless, but that are still deeply ingrained in to the mainstream psyche.

It isn’t simple. It is however necessary. It’s the only way for us, especially now. There’s no getting away from it. It might take longer. But we’ve just witnessed, last Thursday, that there is no ‘Left’ short cut to success for the Green Party.

And the tide of history is on our side. We call for one planet living (as opposed to the three or four planet living that our current economic model involves). Sooner or later, either we’ll be electable making that call, or the Earth will force it upon us all anyway.

Either the human race will catch up with the tide of history, or rising sea levels and storms will sweep away all boats.

Labour: a thoroughly growth-fetishising party

But, I hear you cry, isn’t Corbyn’s Labour ‘onside’ on ‘environmental’ issues?

In name only. You can tell that they aren’t actually even remotely serious about ecology or about quality of life, by reference to this simple fact: that their number one criticism of the Conservative Government is that its ‘austerity’ policies are holding back economic growth. Corbyn and McDonnell repeatedly call for faster growth. In other words: they repeatedly call for worsening the number one cause of the ecological crisis.

As I’ve detailed before on this site, this oh-so-tediously-mainstream call is the basis of their incredibly dodgy policies on matters such as airports and roads (they want them expanded) and coal mining (ditto). Such policies are a scandal, in this day and age.

Most of us like Labour a lot more than the Conservatives. But let’s face it: Labourism is hopelessly past its sell by date. We need an alternative to Tory cuts that does not merely involve reheated state-centric growthism.

You can’t out-Corbyn Corbyn

It is therefore of course the Green Party that has a USP: for example, in being serious on tackling air pollution; on genuinely sustainable public transport, walking and cycling; in policies for localisation and building resilience; for green spaces and ‘green lungs’; for food sovereignty; for nature; for non-human animals; for tackling the causes of ill-health.

Anyone who really cares about any of these things will get less than nowhere, by voting Labour.

The Green Party got so excited last year about having, for the first time ever, a public profile on issues other than stereotypically ‘green’ issues, that it has forgotten this USP. It’s past time now that we reclaimed it. We cannot fight Corbyn’s Labour on its own ground: the proof of that is in last week’s election results. We must fight, instead, on our ground.

For let’s note what the places where we really struggled last week – places like Oxford, Norwich and Bristol – have in common. They are all University cities. The kinds of places where the appeal of Corbyn to students and to the ‘educated middle classes’ is causing us Greens trouble: because our ‘Leftist’ packaging gives us little to offer these voters that they don’t already get from the new Labour leadership.

But they are also the places where an appeal along the distinctively green lines that I outlined above could work: an appeal to eco-logic, and to quality of life.

Meanwhile, it’s important to be clear that a Party that tries to be ‘more left wing than Labour’ is going to undercut terminally the appeal that we clearly can have (as several of our Council election results last week showed) in Conservative-held areas.

A state-centric vision, talk of being a strongly ‘Left’ Party, appearing to favour open door immigration, an insufficiently critical attitude toward the EU: ideas and framings such as these will make it impossible to win over genuinely conservative voters who we could win over to the politics of ecologism.

The ‘Conservative’ Party has abandoned conservatism in favour of neoliberalism; we should be appealing to those voters too, and not trying to out-Labour Labour.

Beyond ‘left’ vs ‘right’

Every time you says “We’re a Left Party”, you’re reinforcing the tried old Left vs Right – Labour vs Conservative – framing of politics. Meanwhile, the Left vs Right dichotomy simply no longer addresses many of the distinctive challenges of the 21st century. Rather, the relevant dichotomies include these:

• One planet living sanity vs. growthist fantasy;
• ‘Small is beautiful’ vs gigantism, whether corporate or state based;
• Localisation and resilience vs ‘free trade’ globalisation;
• Quality vs. quantity;
• Green vs. ‘grey’.

On all of these fronts – whether the issue is TTIP, or transport policy, or whatever – we are, for all Corbyn’s virtues, on the other side of the issue from him and his party.

Labour are as hooked as the Conservatives on growthist business as usual; they therefore have nothing to offer our children and grandchildren. Their outdated philosophy needs to be made to yield (at the ballot box) to the philosophy of the future: green philosophy.

Otherwise, a grim future beckons, in which human survival, let alone flourishing in the true sense of the word, cannot be taken for granted. Greens, let’s rise to the challenge!

Rupert Read is the Chair of Green House. A former Norwich City Councillor, he stood in Cambridge as Parliamentary candidate for the Greens in the 2015 general election.

We all enjoyed a good stink here in Bristol last month, as the national press seized upon Bristol City Council’s new fad for spraying weeds with vinegar.

It’s billed as an ‘eco-friendly alternative’ to herbicides, but sadly it’s not one that is tremendously effective for weed control in large public spaces.

But behind the headlines, the real story is that citizens in Bristol and elsewhere are rejecting glyphosate – the world’s biggest selling herbicide, described by the WHO as a probable human carcinogen – even as local authorities remain doggedly determined to use it.

The Council’s fondness for vinegar, first described in a press release from our campaign group, the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, was reported in the local paper then quickly took on a life of its own. My phone was soon buzzing with journalists on the hunt for an acrid haze hanging over Cotham, the part of the city where the Council is trying out vinegar as an alternative to glyphosate.

“I know this sounds shallow, but we really need an angry resident to make this work”, one TV producer implored. Needless to say, none of the locals had noticed anything, but that didn’t stop the entire city smelling “just like a fish and chip shop“ by the time the last tabloid was done.

I’ll take anything but glyphosate, thanks

So, has ‘vinegar-gate’ left us any the wiser about what local authorities should be using for weed control?

From our perspective at the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, this storm in a condiment cap has at least helped raise the profile of what gets sprayed on our city’s streets. And despite the sensationalist reporting, many readers saw through the fug to the core issue at hand – which is that the routine spraying of glyphosate and other toxic chemicals in public spaces has got to stop.

As one commentator on the Daily Mail website put it, “I would rather smell vinegar than catch cancer.” This sentiment was echoed again and again, with surprisingly few readers springing to glyphosate’s defense. It will be interesting to see how well retail sales of RoundUp and other glyphosate-based gardening products hold up as the row continues over its health impacts.

Our experience in speaking to people in Bristol is that many people are simply not aware that glyphosate is being sprayed in roads, housing estates, parks and play areas. When they do become aware, the vast majority of people support an outright ban on this practice, or much tighter restrictions on its use. In the latest results of our rolling online survey, only 8.6% of respondents agree that herbicide sprays are a ‘wholly acceptable’ means of weed control.

The survey has received several reports of mild to severe poisoning among cats and dogs that had licked herbicide-coated plants. It also shows that the Council is failing to give warning of sprays to take place, despite a promise to “make available full information” on pesticide use. Although half of respondents have seen sprayers at work in Bristol, only 1% have ever seen any kind of warning notice. The situation in other British cities may well be similar.

As one mother wrote to us, “I was with my toddler when I saw this machine driving down the pavement with a toxic sticker on the back. I was shocked that this was happening with no warning, and that my son was exposed to these chemicals.”

Another respondent said: “I saw a family out last autumn innocently gathering fallen leaves, and felt obliged to advise them to keep clear of the sprayed areas. No signs anywhere that this was going to be done.”

The spread of Pesticide-Free Zones

In Bristol and probably other cities as well, public opinion seems to be moving ahead of local authority practice. Our Pesticide Free Zone action – in which citizens pledge to avoid glyphosate and other harmful forms of pest control in their own outdoors space – is steadily gaining momentum, with over 300 gardens, allotments and driveways pledged thus far.

Likewise we hope to recruit schools health settings as Pesticide Free Zones. Given that children are particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of pesticide exposure, we expected the handful of schools approached thus far to readily comply.

But this has not generally been the case, for reasons not entirely clear. In one instance, it was obvious that the head teacher and governors did not know whether pesticides were applied on play areas or not. If this is typical, it suggests that schools need to develop explicit policies on pesticide use within their ground maintenance teams.

Nonetheless, local authorities are still the primary target of most pesticide-free city campaigners, because of the large land banks that they control. It seems perverse that households are excluding pesticides from their own gardens, only to encounter these substances when they enter a public space.

This raises questions of choice and agency, as well as a social justice issue in respect of the 600+ social housing estates that are sprayed city-wide under the Council’s second largest glyphosate contract. Unlike owner-occupiers, social housing tenants have no choice over whether children and pets are exposed to glyphosate in their immediate outdoors space or not.

Designed to fail?

So what does leadership by local authorities look like? Like other pesticide-free city campaigns in the UK, we are asking our Council to do two things – first, take glyphosate off the table, and second, come up with sensible alternatives for weed control.

This is not rocket science. It is being achieved by many other European cities and local authorities here would do well to draw on their experience. On both points, Bristol’s dunking in vinegar falls short of the mark:

• It applies only to a small area of the city, and leaves the door wide open to the return of glyphosate should the trial be deemed a failure.
• At the same time it invites failure by choosing vinegar ahead of more credible technologies for safer weed control.
• Worse still, large tracts of land will not receive any weed control at all as the Council’s regular spray contractors down tools for the duration of the trial.

This is not what pesticide-free policies should look like. If anything smells fishy, it is the design of this trial. Has it – as Pesticide Action Network UK says – been “set up to fail”?

Many other effective alternatives exist, as PAN-UK point out, and are already in use in other European and UK cities. Indeed there are many hundreds of examples from around the world of towns and cities, both larger and smaller than Bristol, which have effective, sustainable, economic, non-chemical weed and pest control regimes in place. Pesticide-free is possible!

The Cotham trial could be a useful start, but what we really need is a full and thorough trial of all available non-chemical weed control options conducted city-wide.

Thanks to ‘vinegar-gate’, more people know that local authorities have a problem when it comes to dealing with plants in the wrong places. In Bristol and other urban areas, it can only be a matter of time before local politicians listen to public opinion and stop dousing our streets in unsafe chemicals.

Harriet Williams is a member of PlaySafe Bristol, part of the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance.

We all enjoyed a good stink here in Bristol last month, as the national press seized upon Bristol City Council’s new fad for spraying weeds with vinegar.

It’s billed as an ‘eco-friendly alternative’ to herbicides, but sadly it’s not one that is tremendously effective for weed control in large public spaces.

But behind the headlines, the real story is that citizens in Bristol and elsewhere are rejecting glyphosate – the world’s biggest selling herbicide, described by the WHO as a probable human carcinogen – even as local authorities remain doggedly determined to use it.

The Council’s fondness for vinegar, first described in a press release from our campaign group, the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, was reported in the local paper then quickly took on a life of its own. My phone was soon buzzing with journalists on the hunt for an acrid haze hanging over Cotham, the part of the city where the Council is trying out vinegar as an alternative to glyphosate.

“I know this sounds shallow, but we really need an angry resident to make this work”, one TV producer implored. Needless to say, none of the locals had noticed anything, but that didn’t stop the entire city smelling “just like a fish and chip shop“ by the time the last tabloid was done.

I’ll take anything but glyphosate, thanks

So, has ‘vinegar-gate’ left us any the wiser about what local authorities should be using for weed control?

From our perspective at the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, this storm in a condiment cap has at least helped raise the profile of what gets sprayed on our city’s streets. And despite the sensationalist reporting, many readers saw through the fug to the core issue at hand – which is that the routine spraying of glyphosate and other toxic chemicals in public spaces has got to stop.

As one commentator on the Daily Mail website put it, “I would rather smell vinegar than catch cancer.” This sentiment was echoed again and again, with surprisingly few readers springing to glyphosate’s defense. It will be interesting to see how well retail sales of RoundUp and other glyphosate-based gardening products hold up as the row continues over its health impacts.

Our experience in speaking to people in Bristol is that many people are simply not aware that glyphosate is being sprayed in roads, housing estates, parks and play areas. When they do become aware, the vast majority of people support an outright ban on this practice, or much tighter restrictions on its use. In the latest results of our rolling online survey, only 8.6% of respondents agree that herbicide sprays are a ‘wholly acceptable’ means of weed control.

The survey has received several reports of mild to severe poisoning among cats and dogs that had licked herbicide-coated plants. It also shows that the Council is failing to give warning of sprays to take place, despite a promise to “make available full information” on pesticide use. Although half of respondents have seen sprayers at work in Bristol, only 1% have ever seen any kind of warning notice. The situation in other British cities may well be similar.

As one mother wrote to us, “I was with my toddler when I saw this machine driving down the pavement with a toxic sticker on the back. I was shocked that this was happening with no warning, and that my son was exposed to these chemicals.”

Another respondent said: “I saw a family out last autumn innocently gathering fallen leaves, and felt obliged to advise them to keep clear of the sprayed areas. No signs anywhere that this was going to be done.”

The spread of Pesticide-Free Zones

In Bristol and probably other cities as well, public opinion seems to be moving ahead of local authority practice. Our Pesticide Free Zone action – in which citizens pledge to avoid glyphosate and other harmful forms of pest control in their own outdoors space – is steadily gaining momentum, with over 300 gardens, allotments and driveways pledged thus far.

Likewise we hope to recruit schools health settings as Pesticide Free Zones. Given that children are particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of pesticide exposure, we expected the handful of schools approached thus far to readily comply.

But this has not generally been the case, for reasons not entirely clear. In one instance, it was obvious that the head teacher and governors did not know whether pesticides were applied on play areas or not. If this is typical, it suggests that schools need to develop explicit policies on pesticide use within their ground maintenance teams.

Nonetheless, local authorities are still the primary target of most pesticide-free city campaigners, because of the large land banks that they control. It seems perverse that households are excluding pesticides from their own gardens, only to encounter these substances when they enter a public space.

This raises questions of choice and agency, as well as a social justice issue in respect of the 600+ social housing estates that are sprayed city-wide under the Council’s second largest glyphosate contract. Unlike owner-occupiers, social housing tenants have no choice over whether children and pets are exposed to glyphosate in their immediate outdoors space or not.

Designed to fail?

So what does leadership by local authorities look like? Like other pesticide-free city campaigns in the UK, we are asking our Council to do two things – first, take glyphosate off the table, and second, come up with sensible alternatives for weed control.

This is not rocket science. It is being achieved by many other European cities and local authorities here would do well to draw on their experience. On both points, Bristol’s dunking in vinegar falls short of the mark:

• It applies only to a small area of the city, and leaves the door wide open to the return of glyphosate should the trial be deemed a failure.
• At the same time it invites failure by choosing vinegar ahead of more credible technologies for safer weed control.
• Worse still, large tracts of land will not receive any weed control at all as the Council’s regular spray contractors down tools for the duration of the trial.

This is not what pesticide-free policies should look like. If anything smells fishy, it is the design of this trial. Has it – as Pesticide Action Network UK says – been “set up to fail”?

Many other effective alternatives exist, as PAN-UK point out, and are already in use in other European and UK cities. Indeed there are many hundreds of examples from around the world of towns and cities, both larger and smaller than Bristol, which have effective, sustainable, economic, non-chemical weed and pest control regimes in place. Pesticide-free is possible!

The Cotham trial could be a useful start, but what we really need is a full and thorough trial of all available non-chemical weed control options conducted city-wide.

Thanks to ‘vinegar-gate’, more people know that local authorities have a problem when it comes to dealing with plants in the wrong places. In Bristol and other urban areas, it can only be a matter of time before local politicians listen to public opinion and stop dousing our streets in unsafe chemicals.

Harriet Williams is a member of PlaySafe Bristol, part of the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance.

We all enjoyed a good stink here in Bristol last month, as the national press seized upon Bristol City Council’s new fad for spraying weeds with vinegar.

It’s billed as an ‘eco-friendly alternative’ to herbicides, but sadly it’s not one that is tremendously effective for weed control in large public spaces.

But behind the headlines, the real story is that citizens in Bristol and elsewhere are rejecting glyphosate – the world’s biggest selling herbicide, described by the WHO as a probable human carcinogen – even as local authorities remain doggedly determined to use it.

The Council’s fondness for vinegar, first described in a press release from our campaign group, the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, was reported in the local paper then quickly took on a life of its own. My phone was soon buzzing with journalists on the hunt for an acrid haze hanging over Cotham, the part of the city where the Council is trying out vinegar as an alternative to glyphosate.

“I know this sounds shallow, but we really need an angry resident to make this work”, one TV producer implored. Needless to say, none of the locals had noticed anything, but that didn’t stop the entire city smelling “just like a fish and chip shop“ by the time the last tabloid was done.

I’ll take anything but glyphosate, thanks

So, has ‘vinegar-gate’ left us any the wiser about what local authorities should be using for weed control?

From our perspective at the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, this storm in a condiment cap has at least helped raise the profile of what gets sprayed on our city’s streets. And despite the sensationalist reporting, many readers saw through the fug to the core issue at hand – which is that the routine spraying of glyphosate and other toxic chemicals in public spaces has got to stop.

As one commentator on the Daily Mail website put it, “I would rather smell vinegar than catch cancer.” This sentiment was echoed again and again, with surprisingly few readers springing to glyphosate’s defense. It will be interesting to see how well retail sales of RoundUp and other glyphosate-based gardening products hold up as the row continues over its health impacts.

Our experience in speaking to people in Bristol is that many people are simply not aware that glyphosate is being sprayed in roads, housing estates, parks and play areas. When they do become aware, the vast majority of people support an outright ban on this practice, or much tighter restrictions on its use. In the latest results of our rolling online survey, only 8.6% of respondents agree that herbicide sprays are a ‘wholly acceptable’ means of weed control.

The survey has received several reports of mild to severe poisoning among cats and dogs that had licked herbicide-coated plants. It also shows that the Council is failing to give warning of sprays to take place, despite a promise to “make available full information” on pesticide use. Although half of respondents have seen sprayers at work in Bristol, only 1% have ever seen any kind of warning notice. The situation in other British cities may well be similar.

As one mother wrote to us, “I was with my toddler when I saw this machine driving down the pavement with a toxic sticker on the back. I was shocked that this was happening with no warning, and that my son was exposed to these chemicals.”

Another respondent said: “I saw a family out last autumn innocently gathering fallen leaves, and felt obliged to advise them to keep clear of the sprayed areas. No signs anywhere that this was going to be done.”

The spread of Pesticide-Free Zones

In Bristol and probably other cities as well, public opinion seems to be moving ahead of local authority practice. Our Pesticide Free Zone action – in which citizens pledge to avoid glyphosate and other harmful forms of pest control in their own outdoors space – is steadily gaining momentum, with over 300 gardens, allotments and driveways pledged thus far.

Likewise we hope to recruit schools health settings as Pesticide Free Zones. Given that children are particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of pesticide exposure, we expected the handful of schools approached thus far to readily comply.

But this has not generally been the case, for reasons not entirely clear. In one instance, it was obvious that the head teacher and governors did not know whether pesticides were applied on play areas or not. If this is typical, it suggests that schools need to develop explicit policies on pesticide use within their ground maintenance teams.

Nonetheless, local authorities are still the primary target of most pesticide-free city campaigners, because of the large land banks that they control. It seems perverse that households are excluding pesticides from their own gardens, only to encounter these substances when they enter a public space.

This raises questions of choice and agency, as well as a social justice issue in respect of the 600+ social housing estates that are sprayed city-wide under the Council’s second largest glyphosate contract. Unlike owner-occupiers, social housing tenants have no choice over whether children and pets are exposed to glyphosate in their immediate outdoors space or not.

Designed to fail?

So what does leadership by local authorities look like? Like other pesticide-free city campaigns in the UK, we are asking our Council to do two things – first, take glyphosate off the table, and second, come up with sensible alternatives for weed control.

This is not rocket science. It is being achieved by many other European cities and local authorities here would do well to draw on their experience. On both points, Bristol’s dunking in vinegar falls short of the mark:

• It applies only to a small area of the city, and leaves the door wide open to the return of glyphosate should the trial be deemed a failure.
• At the same time it invites failure by choosing vinegar ahead of more credible technologies for safer weed control.
• Worse still, large tracts of land will not receive any weed control at all as the Council’s regular spray contractors down tools for the duration of the trial.

This is not what pesticide-free policies should look like. If anything smells fishy, it is the design of this trial. Has it – as Pesticide Action Network UK says – been “set up to fail”?

Many other effective alternatives exist, as PAN-UK point out, and are already in use in other European and UK cities. Indeed there are many hundreds of examples from around the world of towns and cities, both larger and smaller than Bristol, which have effective, sustainable, economic, non-chemical weed and pest control regimes in place. Pesticide-free is possible!

The Cotham trial could be a useful start, but what we really need is a full and thorough trial of all available non-chemical weed control options conducted city-wide.

Thanks to ‘vinegar-gate’, more people know that local authorities have a problem when it comes to dealing with plants in the wrong places. In Bristol and other urban areas, it can only be a matter of time before local politicians listen to public opinion and stop dousing our streets in unsafe chemicals.

Harriet Williams is a member of PlaySafe Bristol, part of the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance.

We all enjoyed a good stink here in Bristol last month, as the national press seized upon Bristol City Council’s new fad for spraying weeds with vinegar.

It’s billed as an ‘eco-friendly alternative’ to herbicides, but sadly it’s not one that is tremendously effective for weed control in large public spaces.

But behind the headlines, the real story is that citizens in Bristol and elsewhere are rejecting glyphosate – the world’s biggest selling herbicide, described by the WHO as a probable human carcinogen – even as local authorities remain doggedly determined to use it.

The Council’s fondness for vinegar, first described in a press release from our campaign group, the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, was reported in the local paper then quickly took on a life of its own. My phone was soon buzzing with journalists on the hunt for an acrid haze hanging over Cotham, the part of the city where the Council is trying out vinegar as an alternative to glyphosate.

“I know this sounds shallow, but we really need an angry resident to make this work”, one TV producer implored. Needless to say, none of the locals had noticed anything, but that didn’t stop the entire city smelling “just like a fish and chip shop“ by the time the last tabloid was done.

I’ll take anything but glyphosate, thanks

So, has ‘vinegar-gate’ left us any the wiser about what local authorities should be using for weed control?

From our perspective at the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance, this storm in a condiment cap has at least helped raise the profile of what gets sprayed on our city’s streets. And despite the sensationalist reporting, many readers saw through the fug to the core issue at hand – which is that the routine spraying of glyphosate and other toxic chemicals in public spaces has got to stop.

As one commentator on the Daily Mail website put it, “I would rather smell vinegar than catch cancer.” This sentiment was echoed again and again, with surprisingly few readers springing to glyphosate’s defense. It will be interesting to see how well retail sales of RoundUp and other glyphosate-based gardening products hold up as the row continues over its health impacts.

Our experience in speaking to people in Bristol is that many people are simply not aware that glyphosate is being sprayed in roads, housing estates, parks and play areas. When they do become aware, the vast majority of people support an outright ban on this practice, or much tighter restrictions on its use. In the latest results of our rolling online survey, only 8.6% of respondents agree that herbicide sprays are a ‘wholly acceptable’ means of weed control.

The survey has received several reports of mild to severe poisoning among cats and dogs that had licked herbicide-coated plants. It also shows that the Council is failing to give warning of sprays to take place, despite a promise to “make available full information” on pesticide use. Although half of respondents have seen sprayers at work in Bristol, only 1% have ever seen any kind of warning notice. The situation in other British cities may well be similar.

As one mother wrote to us, “I was with my toddler when I saw this machine driving down the pavement with a toxic sticker on the back. I was shocked that this was happening with no warning, and that my son was exposed to these chemicals.”

Another respondent said: “I saw a family out last autumn innocently gathering fallen leaves, and felt obliged to advise them to keep clear of the sprayed areas. No signs anywhere that this was going to be done.”

The spread of Pesticide-Free Zones

In Bristol and probably other cities as well, public opinion seems to be moving ahead of local authority practice. Our Pesticide Free Zone action – in which citizens pledge to avoid glyphosate and other harmful forms of pest control in their own outdoors space – is steadily gaining momentum, with over 300 gardens, allotments and driveways pledged thus far.

Likewise we hope to recruit schools health settings as Pesticide Free Zones. Given that children are particularly vulnerable to the health impacts of pesticide exposure, we expected the handful of schools approached thus far to readily comply.

But this has not generally been the case, for reasons not entirely clear. In one instance, it was obvious that the head teacher and governors did not know whether pesticides were applied on play areas or not. If this is typical, it suggests that schools need to develop explicit policies on pesticide use within their ground maintenance teams.

Nonetheless, local authorities are still the primary target of most pesticide-free city campaigners, because of the large land banks that they control. It seems perverse that households are excluding pesticides from their own gardens, only to encounter these substances when they enter a public space.

This raises questions of choice and agency, as well as a social justice issue in respect of the 600+ social housing estates that are sprayed city-wide under the Council’s second largest glyphosate contract. Unlike owner-occupiers, social housing tenants have no choice over whether children and pets are exposed to glyphosate in their immediate outdoors space or not.

Designed to fail?

So what does leadership by local authorities look like? Like other pesticide-free city campaigns in the UK, we are asking our Council to do two things – first, take glyphosate off the table, and second, come up with sensible alternatives for weed control.

This is not rocket science. It is being achieved by many other European cities and local authorities here would do well to draw on their experience. On both points, Bristol’s dunking in vinegar falls short of the mark:

• It applies only to a small area of the city, and leaves the door wide open to the return of glyphosate should the trial be deemed a failure.
• At the same time it invites failure by choosing vinegar ahead of more credible technologies for safer weed control.
• Worse still, large tracts of land will not receive any weed control at all as the Council’s regular spray contractors down tools for the duration of the trial.

This is not what pesticide-free policies should look like. If anything smells fishy, it is the design of this trial. Has it – as Pesticide Action Network UK says – been “set up to fail”?

Many other effective alternatives exist, as PAN-UK point out, and are already in use in other European and UK cities. Indeed there are many hundreds of examples from around the world of towns and cities, both larger and smaller than Bristol, which have effective, sustainable, economic, non-chemical weed and pest control regimes in place. Pesticide-free is possible!

The Cotham trial could be a useful start, but what we really need is a full and thorough trial of all available non-chemical weed control options conducted city-wide.

Thanks to ‘vinegar-gate’, more people know that local authorities have a problem when it comes to dealing with plants in the wrong places. In Bristol and other urban areas, it can only be a matter of time before local politicians listen to public opinion and stop dousing our streets in unsafe chemicals.

Harriet Williams is a member of PlaySafe Bristol, part of the Pesticide Safe Bristol Alliance.