Reports by vets and hygiene inspectors detail more than 4,000 severe breaches of animal welfare regulations over the past two years, including instances of chickens being boiled alive and trucks of animals suffocating or freezing to death.

The data – a log of reports submitted to the Food Standards Agency, the industry regulator – reveals how regular breakdowns on production lines, equipment failures and poor procedures in abattoirs result in thousands of animals being subjected to avoidable suffering each year.

Scores of individual acts of cruelty and neglect by slaughterhouse staff, hauliers and farmers are also documented – alongside malpractice that increases the risk of food poisoning.

Many animals are presented for slaughter in appalling condition, the records show – some emaciated or too weak to stand, others diseased or suffering from fractures and open wounds. Failures in stunning procedures – which can result in animals regaining consciousness before being killed – are commonplace.

These animals are subjected to avoidable pain and suffering

Vets and meat hygiene inspectors working for the FSA inside abattoirs reported a total of 9,511 animal welfare breaches between July 2014 and June this year, with records classified into three categories according to severity. Category 2 refers to a low risk isolated incident, while category 4, the most serious, means animals were subjected to “avoidable pain, distress or suffering.”

The Bureau’s analysis reveals almost half the recorded incidents were category 4 breaches – a total of 4,455, an average of six a day. A single breach can involve hundreds of animals.

Responding to the findings, Neil Parish, chairman of the Commons Select Committee for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, called for the Government to crack down on cruelty at abattoirs. The revelation that an average of six serious welfare breaches happen each day is “shocking,” he told the Bureau.

“There is no place for animal cruelty at any stage of farm production – including the slaughterhouse,” said Parish, a Conservative MP and farmer.
“This country prides itself as having some of the highest animal welfare standards in the world. It’s vital the authorities crack down on any abuses and ensure there is zero tolerance to any mistreatment of animals when slaughtered.”

In the last 5 years there have been over 16,000 breaches of welfare regulation

The Bureau also reviewed data going back to April 2011. In total over the five years there were 16,370 breaches of welfare regulations, of which 6,241 were category 4. The vast majority of the most severe breaches happened as animals were transported from farms to abattoirs.

The welfare infractions reviewed by the Bureau include a cow being “violently slammed” against a wall following an argument between two workers, an abattoir worker beating three bulls with a wooden stick and electric prod, and a haulier hitting and kicking cattle during unloading, an incident which was caught on CCTV. Many involve sheep being grabbed by the wool and ears or dragged by the horns, or pigs being lifted by their ears and tails.

Failures in the slaughter process itself are also highlighted, with thousands of instances of animals not being stunned or killed properly – in some cases not stunned at all and in others regaining consciousness afterwards.
Inspectors recorded cases of chickens and pigs being immersed into tanks of scalding hot water – used to soften the skin and remove hair or feathers – while still alive.

Among the injuries found on livestock presented from farms include a case where a one-eyed cow had a face lesion “completely full of worms” due to an injury which had not healed properly.

A batch of sheep arrived at one abattoir with a large number of conditions – 10 found to be suffering from foot rot, six with respiratory conditions, five with eye conditions, one with ear trauma and one with the parasitic disease sheep scab. At another a three-legged cow – its leg reportedly amputated when it was a calf – arrived “injured and bleeding” with “no bedding in the compartment during transportation.”

Inspectors noted one incident where a haulier driver opened a lorry carrying sheep and “saw that the deck had fallen from the driver’s side. There were 3 dead sheep and one stuck under the deck.” The inspector asked a plant operator to kill the sheep to reduce the suffering.

Hundreds of animals are dead by the time they arrive at the slaughterhouse

Almost 600 instances were recorded of animals arriving at slaughterhouses already dead. In one case 574 chickens, from a load of 6,072 birds, died after being left on a lorry for an extended period of time in very hot conditions. This counts as one welfare breach despite involving hundreds of birds. In another example, 165 chickens died on the way to the abattoir and 17 had to be culled immediately as a result of “hypothermia due to transport with summer curtains in freezing weather.”

In one consignment of 220 pigs, 33 were dead on arrival at the slaughterhouse with “suffocation concluded as possible cause of death.”
The data also highlights practices that could facilitate the spread of the bacteria campylobacter, the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK. About 4 in 5 cases of the infection, which kills about 100 people a year, come from contaminated poultry.

Ensuring birds are as calm as possible when they are being caught and transported is an important preventative measure, because stressed birds defecate more, potentially spreading the infection and increasing the risk of meat contamination. However the data includes regular instances of chickens being “overstocked” in crates and incidents of birds being left on lorries for lengthy periods of time. In one case, because of a breakdown at the plant, 14 trucks were left overnight for more than 12 hours; in another, birds were left in crates at the abattoir for 20 hours.

Inspectors report facing threats of intimidation and physical violence

More than 900 million farm animals are killed for food each year in Britain. There are currently 317 approved slaughterhouses across the UK, most run by a handful of large companies, which now dominate the meat-processing sector. Many smaller independent abattoirs have been bought out.

Although each facility is responsible for ensuring the health and welfare of livestock processed at the plant – larger abattoirs are required to have a dedicated animal welfare officer – independent vets and meat hygiene inspectors reporting to the FSA are permanently on site to carry out checks.

However union officials representing meat inspectors say there is a staff shortage, meaning breaches are likely to be underreported. “Simply there are not enough staff to monitor animal welfare in areas like the killing rooms,” said Paul Bell, a Unison officer with responsibility for abattoirs. Members had witnessed abattoir staff inflicting pain and shouting at animals, he said.

He also claimed inspectors attempting to carry out checks faced bullying and harassment, including “threats of physical violence, victimisation, intimidation, malicious lies and rumours.”

It is unclear from the data how many of the breaches resulted in any sanctions or improvements. Most of the level 4 breaches were referred to regional Trading Standards offices, which have responsibility for monitoring farms and transportation, but there is no requirement for the vets and inspectors who make the referral to record details of what happens next.

The FSA is responsible for monitoring welfare inside slaughterhouses. Responding to the Bureau’s investigation, it said it had a “zero tolerance” attitude to welfare breaches and used a “proportionate approach” to enforcement. Action could include suspending or withdrawing certificates of competence from slaughterers, referring cases for prosecution, stopping operations or serving welfare enforcement notices.

“There is a comprehensive animal verification procedure in place at every slaughterhouse for monitoring animal welfare,” it said in a statement. “4 scores (meaning level 4 breaches) can be the result of unavoidable accidents rather than deliberate abuse.”

Reports about welfare concerned only a tiny percentage of animals going through slaughterhouses, it pointed out, saying the vast majority of meat processors complied with regulations.

The fact that serious welfare breaches were the exception not the norm was not the point, said Marc Cooper, head of farm animals at the RSPCA.
“Such incidences of severe pain, distress and suffering are wholly unacceptable and completely avoidable,” he said. “If they’re avoidable, that means they shouldn’t be happening at all – you shouldn’t be seeing one. You would hope that strong enforcement action would be taken.”

Between June 2014 and July 2016 all level 4 breaches resulted in enforcement action, said the FSA. It did not state what type of action was taken, though in an earlier response to the Bureau it did provide details of cases referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013 and 2014.

In 2013 and 2014 the FSA referred 14 breaches of welfare regulations to the CPS, of which four resulted in prosecutions. Three of those prosecutions were later dropped. Of the remaining cases, four resulted in warning letters being sent out. Over the course of the two years, two slaughterers’ licences were suspended and three were revoked for failure to comply with welfare legislation.

Pressure groups and unions – backed by a growing number of MPs – believe mandatory CCTV in abattoirs would help combat welfare breaches, with strict rules needed to ensure the footage was available for review by both veterinary staff and independent auditors. The government has so far failed to legislate on the issue.

According to the FSA’s latest estimates, the vast majority of cattle, sheep, pigs and chickens (ranging from 88% to 99% depending on the animal) are killed in premises which have CCTV installed. However the regulator admitted last April that 33 slaughterhouses in England and Wales were refusing to hand over their footage. It has the power to seize footage in certain circumstances, it told the Bureau.

The RSPCA wants CCTV inside transport vehicles

The British Veterinary Association (BVA) is calling for new legislation requiring all abattoirs to install CCTV and provide independent vets with unrestricted access. “CCTV risks being a ‘paper tiger’ if it is not monitored freely and independently,” said BVA president Sean Wensley. “We need to foster a culture of compassion in slaughterhouses, coupled with robust and effective enforcement, so that the animals we farm for food have both a good life and a humane death.”

However a large proportion of the mistreatment or neglect reported by vets and takes place before the animals arrive at the slaughterhouses, rendering such CCTV potentially useless. Almost 90% of the most serious category 4 infractions between 2014 and 2016 related to the transport of livestock from farms.

The RSPCA’s Marc Cooper said such a finding meant mandatory CCTV inside transport vehicles as well as slaughterhouses should be considered.

Meaningful protection for animals could only come from mandatory, independently monitored CCTV, said Isobel Hutchinson, head of campaigns at Animal Aid. “These damning revelations confirm what our undercover investigations have already exposed,” she said. “They show that incompetence and cruelty are rife in UK slaughterhouses, leading to animal suffering on a massive scale.”

This article was originally published by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism
www.the bureauinvestigates.com    

If we’ve learned anything from politics over the past year, it’s that the era of two party politics seems to have crashed into a long-overdue end.

We are now faced with a crossroads: either we allow the UK to succumb to single party hegemony, or we pry open the door to pluralistic politics and allow a truly democratic multi-party politics to thrive.

Failure to achieve proportional representation could leave us facing unending Conservative governments for the foreseeable future – something we desperately cannot afford at this time of poverty and climate crisis.

However, this article isn’t written to make the case for proportional representation. That case has already been effectively made by many other writers. Instead, we need to move our discussion onwards from why we need proportional representation and onto how we can go about getting it.

The threat of continued environmentally reckless, right-wing rule in the UK has led to more and more talk about the possibility of forming some kind of ‘progressive alliance’, emerging to deliver real democracy and to pose an alternative.

Indeed, it has been encouraging to read advocates from across different progressive parties making the case for a progressive alliance. Encouraging words from prominent members have come from the SNP, Labour and the Green Party.

So, how do we get there?

There are clearly plenty of us who believe that ‘progressive’ parties need to start to discuss privately and publicly – to at least consider the possibility of – some kind of electoral pact, a ‘popular front’ that would look to avoid fragmenting the vote among ‘ourselves’ in winnable seats, and that would look therefore toward electing a Parliament in 2020 that would have a progressive majority for democratic change. For mending our broken democracy.

How do we move from general talk to action? Well, we need to have some kind of plan. The think tank that I chair, Green House, has gone beyond op-ed articles toying with the principle of progressive-pacting: we have produced a multi-authored report looking into how a ‘progressive pact’ could work, and thinking through a number of its pros and cons in some detail.

Our report will be formally launched this Friday at Green Party Conference in Birmingham, at a unique panel in the main Conference hall. It will be unique, because on the panel will be not just Caroline Lucas MP, myself, and Zoe Williams of The Guardian chairing, but also Neal Lawson of Compass and Labour, Lisa Nandy MP of Labour, and Chris Bowers of the LibDems. This is perhaps the possibility of progressive alliance already present, in outline.

In order for such a pact as our report envisages to actually fly, it would have to be done in such a way that has real advantages – real possibilities of gains – for all parties involved in it. Political pluralism in this country is not going away. It is ludicrous of Labour’s elite to think that they can win on their own in 2020. Greens are going to have to be an ingredient of such a victory – as are the ‘Nationalist’ Parties, and the Lib Dems too.

While the importance of Labour and Green cooperation is crucial to ensuring a progressive majority in 2020, it is unlikely to be enough on its own without significant input from other parties. Martin Robbin recently illustrated this point in the Guardian, where he noted that even with Greens supporting Labour candidates in large droves, we are likely only to see between 7-11 seat gains for Labour.

If we’re serious about ensuring a progressive majority and electoral reform, then we need to work with others as well as the Labour Party.

The Labour Leader says ‘No’?

It is going to be very hard to get a progressive pact to happen. Jeremy Corbyn, who one might have expected to have been sympathetic to the idea, has seemingly ruled it out – even for the specific case of Caroline Lucas, the Green Mp for Brighton, whop is much closer to Corbyn politically than the great majority of Labour MPs.

But to be fair to Corbyn, he is in the middle of a bruising leadership election. It would be challenging for the Leader of the Opposition, in the middle of such an election campaign, to come out in favour of acting with other parties. It would have required great vision and bravery.

Corbyn is highly likely to win the leadership election. Once he has done so, and with Labour almost certainly continuing to struggle internally and in the opinion polls, then my bet is that he will think again, and start to face reality: without a progressive alliance, Labour will be destroyed by the Conservatives. But with such an alliance, a better future is possible.

And there are historical precedents for this idea, which were no doubt similarly disparaged as pipe-dreams when they were first floated. The most striking such precedent is the 1903 pact with the Liberals that in effect enabled Labour to get into Parliament in the first place in numbers, in 1906.

There are powerful historical arguments for the consideration of such pacts by Greens. Let me briefly address directly those who do or would like to support my Party, the Party hosting this debate at its conference next week …

The only way that a new party managed to break through in a significant way, early in the 20th century, was through an electoral pact with an old party. Then it was Labour with Liberals. Now it could be Greens, with Labour and Liberals and nationalists. This progressive alliance idea is about enabling change, under the crazy First Past The Post system, and enabling growth for the Green Party. (Of course, as soon we get electoral reform, everything will open up.)

1903-6 saw an electoral pact in some seats that enabled a good new small party to grow exponentially (and that prevented what would otherwise have been a disastrous long Tory hegemony under FPTP). Just what some of us in the Greens are proposing now, and asking colleagues in other parties to hear and to join in with.

Such a pact now could have even more exciting and long-lasting results than it did back then, if it brings electoral reform in its wake! And support from all parties – and that includes Labour – for proportional representation must be a sine qua non of any progressive pact.

A more recent precedent is the little-known ‘non-aggression pact’ between Labour and Lib Dems which in 1997 was responsible for the scale of the destruction of the Conservatives at the hands of both those parties, and in particular of the largely-successful ‘decapitation strategy’ that they jointly practiced, that year. Here is a rare mention of that pact, which was unofficial and involved Labour and Lib Dems not doing work in each others’ target seats.

Real leadership for a new progressive politics

You might think that a progressive pact is an attempt at a fix, bypassing the voters right to democratically express their will. Not so. This is about enabling more people to vote for what they believe in and to get it:

• By achieving PR, which will at last end tactical voting which was still an utter bane in 2015. Many millions of voters did not vote for what they believed in, because of FPTP. (In Cambridge, where I stood as MP-candidate, we reckon there were at least c.5-6k Greens who voted Labour, for example.)

• By seeking to ‘trade’ (vote-swap, if you will) Green votes in some marginals, votes that would otherwise mostly be tactically squeezed into semi-non-existence anyway, for enabling Green votes en masse in seats where, under the pact, we will be able to win. (And the same goes for Labour, and for the LibDems, and for Plaid Cymru…)

In sum: in 2020, a progressive pact would enable people to vote for (and achieve!) what they believe in. It would give voters the option of an alternative to endless Tory rule, an end to FPTP, and an end to our broken system. A chance for citizens to really take back control …

If it is going to happen, it will take a lot of doing. So we have to get started now! The obstacles, as I’ve already admitted, are of course manifold, from inertia to tribalism. But put simply: it’s time to take the bold step, together, of seriously considering such a pact. The prize is democracy itself, not to mention getting rid of the Tories.

With both the Green Party and Labour coming to the end of leadership contests this September, it is crucial that a ‘progressive alliance’ is one of the things that new leaders prioritise. As members or supporters of political parties, we must use this opportunity to force the issue onto the agenda. For a ‘progressive alliance’ is now the only feasible alternative to continued Conservative government in 2020.

Any leader or leadership contender in any ‘progressive’ party who fails to recognise this risks ‘leading’ their party – and, more important still, their country – only into the dustbin of history.

Rupert Read was Green Party candidate for Cambridge at the 2015 General Election, and is Chair of Green House. He writes regularly for the Ecologist.

The report: Green House think tank’s new report on the progressive pact concept.

Thanks to Atus Mariqueo-Russell for research for this piece.

Globally the cut flower business is worth $100 billion a year, and according to fairtrade.org the main producers are the Netherlands, accounting for 55%, Columbia 18%, Ecuador 9% and Kenya 6%. The UK is the third largest consumer for cut blooms, pipped only by the USA and Germany.

Largely grown in glasshouses, 70% of the world’s flowers arrive via the Netherlands in one of three enormous flower “markets” – take for example the one million metre-squared Aalsmeer flower auction – which has the largest footprint of a building in the world, equating to 128 acres.

But travelling takes its toll on flowers. Not only do they require an enormous amount of energy to be cooled to 2 degrees, and put in a sleep-like trance, they are then sprayed with fungicide, x-rayed, put on a plane, and dipped in silver nitrate where they are mummified and lose all their scent, requiring the consumer to add a sachet of “life-giving” sugar solution to already four-day-old blooms.

Buying locally means that you are ensured a longer shelf life from your flowers, and your bouquet will remain smelling fragrant. It also means you get more choice as many delicate flowers such as sweet peas can’t cope with this process.

Claire Brown, owner of Surry flower farm Plant Passion, and volunteer at Gill Hodgson’s initiative Flowers From the Farm, grows more than 250 varieties for three main markets; local customers, florists and “DIY brides”, who buy the flowers and then create their own bouquets and displays.

With a background in horticulture, Claire seized an opportunity when she saw a gap in the market four years ago: “There has been huge growth in the industry. Before local growers started up there just hadn’t been a place for florists to buy their flowers.

“There were larger growers back in the 1970S but they would grow just one variety of flower. Because they grew such a vast amount, they had to go to market and to the wholesalers and it was very price dependent. When fuel prices went up it put them out of business.

“Fast forward 50 years and we have the Internet, SO we can go directly to the customer and there is such a good local market for this. There hasn’t been that ability to do that before.”

Flowers From the Farm now has more than 300 small flower growing businesses as members of a steadily growing community, and it’s a supportive one at that. Claire said: “Because all the flowers are grown locally to the area they are being sold in, you don’t have a high level of competition, in fact it would be handy to have more growers in the area to cover the demand but I have seen a couple come and go because actually it’s a very skilled job. It’s a hard physical job.”

With Claire’s flowers you know you are getting them at their very best. “I pick my flowers at 6am and they go in a dark barn. They are bought by my clients that afternoon. I don’t need to use chemicals or extra sugar food, and I’ve already got four days ahead of the supermarkets.”

Growing flowers in the British countryside sounds pretty idyllic but the rose-tinted idea of a flower grower’s life being easy is far removed from reality. Jan Waters from JW Blooms in Somerset works 80 hours a week with one other grower to grow, pick and create all the floristry for weddings and provide postal bouquets – she even runs a coffee shop that opens on Sundays.

With a gardening background Jan was inspired to get into growing in 2008 after she picked all the cornflowers from her allotment and saw the delighted reaction from people as she cycled home with them on her bike. “I realised I could sell them, and then I read about Jane Lindsey who started growing cut flowers on her smallholding in Scotland and thought, ‘if she can do it, so can I.'”

When she first set up Jan said she knew of about half a dozen other growers doing the same thing, but now there are huge numbers and it’s rising. “Sarah Raven was hugely influential and gave people the idea they could do this themselves. Over the past four years the industry has really grown. Gill Hodgson made a huge difference with Flowers From the Farm as well.”

There are some key differences to organically grown and glasshouse flowers, and the main one is the variety available to the buyer. Jan said: “The range of flowers I can offer is far greater as I can include flowers that can’t survive the packing process like lilies, roses or tulips can.

“We have just over an acre and in dahlias alone we have more than 40 different varieties.

They also smell amazing, whereas flowers that have been dipped have no fragrance. I don’t use chemicals, the only things I use to spray the flowers are garlic, chili, and sometimes a seaweed spray, so nothing that I wouldn’t eat myself. I dread to think of the chemicals that are sprayed on many of our imported flowers.”

Jan also shares a concern with many discerning consumers about the issue of waste packaging. Flowers that come into the supermarket are wrapped in cellophane, just one more thing that goes into land fill. “I don’t use packaging, and I don’t use the florists’ oasis bricks which are bad for the environment as well as they don’t biodegrade.”

British flower growers are reliant on the seasons, so the choice is more limited come Christmas and the winter months, however there are growers across the world who are appealing to the British taste for flowers year-round who do use organic and ethical methods of growing.

Rosabie Morton of The Real Flower Company helped to set up the Fairtrade rose farm in Nanyuki, Kenya, where roses are grown year-round, employs 500 local workers and utilises the empty space on scheduled passenger jets to carry their flowers, rather than cargo-only flights.

There will always be a place for year-round flowers, but British organic flower growers are offering a wider choice for the consumer and perhaps when you buy your blooms out of season, you’ll think more about what it took to produce them.

Rip currents are found along most coastlines, and where they form near popular beaches they can be deadly.

The journalist Decca Aitkenhead has written movingly about how quickly life can change after her husband was swept out to sea by a rip current while rescuing their son.

A rip current (sometimes incorrectly referred to as a rip tide) is a strong, narrow, fast-flowing current directed toward the sea that travels up to one to two metres per second. Rip currents usually develop close to the shoreline in very shallow water around a metre deep – just where beach bathers are usually found.

For rip currents to form, there must be areas close to the beach where some waves break and other areas where they do not. Usually this is caused by sandbars on the seabed that form from the sediment deposited by waves and tides. Waves are encouraged to break when travelling through the shallower water over the sandbars, but they don’t break when travelling through the regions of deeper water between them.

As waves enter the shallow water they ‘shoal’ – increase in height – and through their momentum they begin to force water towards the shoreline. Once the waves begin to break – so decrease in height – this momentum is reduced, opposed by another force known as a pressure gradient. This opposing pressure gradient causes the sea surface level to rise up by a few centimetres where the waves are breaking.

As the surface level of the sea where the waves are breaking over the sandbars is slightly higher than where the waves are not breaking, a current forms from water that is essentially flowing downhill from where it is higher to where it is lower. These are called feeder currents, and where they meet between sandbars their flow turns away from the shore and becomes the strong rip current that travels through the deeper water.

Why are they dangerous?

Rip currents are dangerous because they carry anything in the water seawards to deeper waters, and are not easy for swimmers to detect. In fact most bathers are not aware of the hazard they represent.

A bather in shallow water is likely to drift with the feeder currents along the shore without noticing, at which point they may be carried into the main rip current. Very quickly, they are carried out to sea and out to depths where waves may break over their heads. At this point bathers frequently panic, often with tragic results. Those attempting to swim back towards the shore against the rip current will quickly tire as the rip will generally be too strong even for the most competent swimmer.

While rip currents are caused by the action of waves they are also affected by the tides. Whether the tide is in or out will vary the depth of water over sandbars, effectively becoming a switch that turns wave breaking on and off as water depth rises and falls.

In Britain’s south-west, for example, sandbars are frequently found around the shoreline at low tide. For several hours low water waves break over these bars and cause rip currents, but as the tide rises the water depth over the bars increases, the wave breaking stops, and the rips become inactive. This repeats over the twice-daily tidal cycle, and is also regulated by the fortnightly cycle of spring tides and neap tides, which gives rip currents a semi-regular pattern.

Knowing this can keep you safe

Rip currents can be identified using complicated instrumentation, GPS-equipped drifter floats, or even by releasing coloured dye into the waters around the surf zone. But a simple trick to spot rip currents is to watch for the patterns of wave breaking visible from the shore.

Seen from a high vantage point such as a cliff above a beach, the contrast of intense white foam where waves are breaking versus the flat, dark waters of the rip current creates a characteristic pattern. In fact the same concept is used to identify rip currents using automated camera systems.

It’s worth remembering though that, somewhat counter-intuitively, bathers should head towards the surf, and stay clear of the dark, flat water under which the fast currents lurk – even though it looks more inviting.

And the safest beaches for bathers are those with a lifeguard, who are trained to recognise safe regions – their flagged areas and advice should always be followed.

Editor’s note: If you get caught up in a rip current, do not try to swim against it. Instead, swim parallel to the beach to reach an opposing current that will carry you back in again.

Martin Austin is Lecturer in Coastal Sediment Dynamics, Bangor University.

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

The first time I met with ‘Pati’ Ruiz Corzo was in central Mexico. We sat at her office, located in the deep mountains of the Sierra Gorda region and I must admit I arrived knowing very little about her, but driven by curiosity. I knew enough to know I would be meeting a highly respected woman and had a hunch that one way or another, she would become a true influence for the rest of my life. A woman of deep spirituality and clear determination with an incomparable passion and dedicated to the defence of what she considers to be her one and only treasure in life. A story anyone can learn from.

In 1986, ‘Pati’ Ruiz founded the Sierra Gorda Ecological Group (Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda), an organisation that today represents a unique model of community ‘conservation economy’. Her goal was to create a sustainable way of living for the more than 120,000 people living inside the Sierra Gorda Reserve, the most densely populated reserve in the entire country; a non-exclusive conservation programme. And so, she did – and still does this – by empowering the historically-marginated female population of the region.

These women have lived always having to keep quiet – oppressed and humiliated by a traditionally ‘macho’ society.  But today, as Pati explains, things have moved on:  “When you hear their motivation as they talk, and how happy they are to be receiving their own extra ‘cents’ per month and when you see that for the first time, some of the fathers have to stay home and take care of their kids because the women have to go work… well, that’s truly my ‘cherry on top of the cake.” Her ultimate goal is to see these women become the voice of conservation in the Sierra Gorda.

Pati Ruiz Corzo spent the first part of her life as a music teacher. In Queretaro, located two hours north of Mexico City, she had spent her time among the upper echelons of Mexican society. She married, had two kids, Beto and Mario, and lived a typically normal life, until one day, she and her husband, decided to leave the city, tired of what she calls ‘the extremes of modern society’.

 “For a long time, I’d put up with the dictates of being ‘modern’; searching for material success, social recognition, being a perfect housewife. There were times when these suffocating dogmas felt a heavy burden.” Pati was certain that she didn’t want her children growing up within a system she didn’t agree with.

”I rebelled against seeing my kids in competition for a ‘camouflaged’ knowledge and not a digested one. In school, their natural talents were being taken away in order to programme them for a stereotype, which I myself was opposed to. I was a teacher for too many years to not be able to see and understand how the gifts of the spirit and the character were being sterilised. Someone’s nature should be respected and should never be expected to accomplish a task imposed by others.”

Such decision was not easy. “I was afraid to leave the only lifestyle I knew, but I wanted to discover other values. I wanted to develop an intimate connection with nature – one that we had clearly lost. I heard shocking examples of kids saying that tomatoes were grown in the back of supermarket stores…my God, they don’t even know were milk comes from, but we can’t blame them for that.”

The Sierra Gorda Reserve has the highest levels of biodiversity in Mexico (the 5^th most biodiverse country in the world) with regions of semi desert, low jungle and a conifer forest that could easily pass for any Canadian landscape. In Pati’s words: ”This is were I found what’s truly real and valuable for me. Pure beauty… I found a treasure. Living surrounded by nature is a pleasure. It’s vibrant and alive. Here, there is no place for lies. We all live without labels”.

This is a woman who has the ability to inspire pretty much everyone that crosses her path. With an imposing charisma, Pati Ruiz manages to speak to large audiences without fear and she almost always ends a speech by singing – reminding us how she has kept alive what she valued the most of her past musical life. An emotional touch that brings pretty much everyone to tears.

She says she was welcomed from the start by the people of the Sierra Gorda. “I was well received from day one. I learned how to talk to them in a way which meant they wouldn’t feel a distance between us and I also brought my accordion with me ande I sang to them. That helped me build real solid bridges with the people of the Sierra Gorda.”

Today Pati Ruiz Corzo shares her passion for conservation and empowerment by holding workshops that attract people from all over the world. She focuses on sharing her message with those who initially were not interested by what she had to say.

When she started out she admits it took time to convince some people to share that journey with her. ”It took some time for some of them to believe me. It wasn’t easy but I felt that the local people just wanted someone to show how we could all move together. Now there’s a huge amount of will from the whole community to overcome all kinds of challenges we face.”

Pati fought not only to convince the local Sierra Gorda community that there was an urgent need to protect their natural heritage, but she has also had to stop many large outside interests and corporations from meddling into the affairs of this 300,000 hectare UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. A geographical isolated region, ideal for hidden and illegal activities to occur, such as mining and logging, underpinned by a country swamped by numerous corruption cases which has brought her into contact and conflict with just as many unsavoury individuals.

”I’ve fought all kinds of interests and individuals, some of them truly horrible. I’ve taken on Governors, the Ministry of Transport and the National Electricity Company. They’ve tried to build dams and highways and install high voltage cables. They’ve tried to take natural resources away from the local community, but as I tell them when I send them away; the only interest and objective of this territory is its total and genuine conservation! No one touches it!”

Clearly a position that has earned her more than a few enemies, especially in the Mexican government. “What they sign up for with international treaties should actually be carried out and not just written. They need to re-orientate public policies. There is a slow response from the Government; the politicians are not being efficient and even less farsighted. But I must say that we also lack a civil society capable of playing the role of a real auditor”.

Pati and her supporters are making headway. In the last five years, the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda has garnered numerous conservation awards including been awarded with the United Nations Champions of the Earth and the National Geographic World Legacy Award (2012, 2016).

“We adopt and adapt. We’ve try to work inter-institutionally with the local and federal governments, as well as other international organisations, even if it means that sometimes I’m forced to put on the pressure and convince them of many things they wouldn’t had done without our campaigning. You’ve no idea – it’s been like organising an anthill!

“We’ve also tried to create an active public spirit. Mexico is a ‘thirsty’ country with galloping desertification levels and we are a small but significant rescue team”. And her work is not only environmental and economic, but cultural too.

“We organise festivals part of one big cultural party made to recover our identity – to remember that we are not ‘Gringos‘ (North-Americans) but ‘Huastecos‘ (Huastec indigenous people). With so many people migrating north, there’s a strong transculturation phenomena. It’s important to feel you belong to a place.”

I stayed for a couple of weeks in the Sierra Gorda and saw the proof of the outcomes Pati talked about. More than a conservationist, she’s an activist in a country that lacks the courage to value such citizens and she’s an example in Mexico and abroad, to anyone who lacks the motivation to speak out and act on their own social conscience.

“Only civil society can change this situation,” she says. “Local answers are the only solution. We have to put our hearts and our dedication into the work and put pressure on local authorities to do the right thing. We have to innovate, do things with love and for the wellbeing of all. 

“I want a total revolution! A change of values where we seek full abundance for everyone, where we recognise nature as a vital part of our lives and where we learn to treat nature with respect and care. I don’t believe in accumulating more and more. What accumulates stagnates and what stagnates rots. I believe in the simplicity of life. Once you know the true value of what is sacred you’ll have the energy to keep going to make those changes.”

This Author:

Tadzio Mac Gregor was born in Mexico City to a French mother and a Mexican father. He has been involved with several social and environmental projects in Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. Having started working recently as a freelance journalist specializing in foreign affairs, environmental conservation and human development he now contributes to several newspapers in Mexico, France, Brazil and the United States

If we’ve learned anything from politics over the past year, it’s that the era of two party politics seems to have crashed into a long-overdue end.

We are now faced with a crossroads: either we allow the UK to succumb to single party hegemony, or we pry open the door to pluralistic politics and allow a truly democratic multi-party politics to thrive.

Failure to achieve proportional representation could leave us facing unending Conservative governments for the foreseeable future – something we desperately cannot afford at this time of poverty and climate crisis.

However, this article isn’t written to make the case for proportional representation. That case has already been effectively made by many other writers. Instead, we need to move our discussion onwards from why we need proportional representation and onto how we can go about getting it.

The threat of continued environmentally reckless, right-wing rule in the UK has led to more and more talk about the possibility of forming some kind of ‘progressive alliance’, emerging to deliver real democracy and to pose an alternative.

Indeed, it has been encouraging to read advocates from across different progressive parties making the case for a progressive alliance. Encouraging words from prominent members have come from the SNP, Labour and the Green Party.

So, how do we get there?

There are clearly plenty of us who believe that ‘progressive’ parties need to start to discuss privately and publicly – to at least consider the possibility of – some kind of electoral pact, a ‘popular front’ that would look to avoid fragmenting the vote among ‘ourselves’ in winnable seats, and that would look therefore toward electing a Parliament in 2020 that would have a progressive majority for democratic change. For mending our broken democracy.

How do we move from general talk to action? Well, we need to have some kind of plan. The think tank that I chair, Green House, has gone beyond op-ed articles toying with the principle of progressive-pacting: we have produced a multi-authored report looking into how a ‘progressive pact’ could work, and thinking through a number of its pros and cons in some detail.

Our report will be formally launched this Friday at Green Party Conference in Birmingham, at a unique panel in the main Conference hall. It will be unique, because on the panel will be not just Caroline Lucas MP, myself, and Zoe Williams of The Guardian chairing, but also Neal Lawson of Compass and Labour, Lisa Nandy MP of Labour, and Chris Bowers of the LibDems. This is perhaps the possibility of progressive alliance already present, in outline.

In order for such a pact as our report envisages to actually fly, it would have to be done in such a way that has real advantages – real possibilities of gains – for all parties involved in it. Political pluralism in this country is not going away. It is ludicrous of Labour’s elite to think that they can win on their own in 2020. Greens are going to have to be an ingredient of such a victory – as are the ‘Nationalist’ Parties, and the Lib Dems too.

While the importance of Labour and Green cooperation is crucial to ensuring a progressive majority in 2020, it is unlikely to be enough on its own without significant input from other parties. Martin Robbin recently illustrated this point in the Guardian, where he noted that even with Greens supporting Labour candidates in large droves, we are likely only to see between 7-11 seat gains for Labour.

If we’re serious about ensuring a progressive majority and electoral reform, then we need to work with others as well as the Labour Party.

The Labour Leader says ‘No’?

It is going to be very hard to get a progressive pact to happen. Jeremy Corbyn, who one might have expected to have been sympathetic to the idea, has seemingly ruled it out – even for the specific case of Caroline Lucas, the Green Mp for Brighton, whop is much closer to Corbyn politically than the great majority of Labour MPs.

But to be fair to Corbyn, he is in the middle of a bruising leadership election. It would be challenging for the Leader of the Opposition, in the middle of such an election campaign, to come out in favour of acting with other parties. It would have required great vision and bravery.

Corbyn is highly likely to win the leadership election. Once he has done so, and with Labour almost certainly continuing to struggle internally and in the opinion polls, then my bet is that he will think again, and start to face reality: without a progressive alliance, Labour will be destroyed by the Conservatives. But with such an alliance, a better future is possible.

And there are historical precedents for this idea, which were no doubt similarly disparaged as pipe-dreams when they were first floated. The most striking such precedent is the 1903 pact with the Liberals that in effect enabled Labour to get into Parliament in the first place in numbers, in 1906.

There are powerful historical arguments for the consideration of such pacts by Greens. Let me briefly address directly those who do or would like to support my Party, the Party hosting this debate at its conference next week …

The only way that a new party managed to break through in a significant way, early in the 20th century, was through an electoral pact with an old party. Then it was Labour with Liberals. Now it could be Greens, with Labour and Liberals and nationalists. This progressive alliance idea is about enabling change, under the crazy First Past The Post system, and enabling growth for the Green Party. (Of course, as soon we get electoral reform, everything will open up.)

1903-6 saw an electoral pact in some seats that enabled a good new small party to grow exponentially (and that prevented what would otherwise have been a disastrous long Tory hegemony under FPTP). Just what some of us in the Greens are proposing now, and asking colleagues in other parties to hear and to join in with.

Such a pact now could have even more exciting and long-lasting results than it did back then, if it brings electoral reform in its wake! And support from all parties – and that includes Labour – for proportional representation must be a sine qua non of any progressive pact.

A more recent precedent is the little-known ‘non-aggression pact’ between Labour and Lib Dems which in 1997 was responsible for the scale of the destruction of the Conservatives at the hands of both those parties, and in particular of the largely-successful ‘decapitation strategy’ that they jointly practiced, that year. Here is a rare mention of that pact, which was unofficial and involved Labour and Lib Dems not doing work in each others’ target seats.

Real leadership for a new progressive politics

You might think that a progressive pact is an attempt at a fix, bypassing the voters right to democratically express their will. Not so. This is about enabling more people to vote for what they believe in and to get it:

• By achieving PR, which will at last end tactical voting which was still an utter bane in 2015. Many millions of voters did not vote for what they believed in, because of FPTP. (In Cambridge, where I stood as MP-candidate, we reckon there were at least c.5-6k Greens who voted Labour, for example.)

• By seeking to ‘trade’ (vote-swap, if you will) Green votes in some marginals, votes that would otherwise mostly be tactically squeezed into semi-non-existence anyway, for enabling Green votes en masse in seats where, under the pact, we will be able to win. (And the same goes for Labour, and for the LibDems, and for Plaid Cymru…)

In sum: in 2020, a progressive pact would enable people to vote for (and achieve!) what they believe in. It would give voters the option of an alternative to endless Tory rule, an end to FPTP, and an end to our broken system. A chance for citizens to really take back control …

If it is going to happen, it will take a lot of doing. So we have to get started now! The obstacles, as I’ve already admitted, are of course manifold, from inertia to tribalism. But put simply: it’s time to take the bold step, together, of seriously considering such a pact. The prize is democracy itself, not to mention getting rid of the Tories.

With both the Green Party and Labour coming to the end of leadership contests this September, it is crucial that a ‘progressive alliance’ is one of the things that new leaders prioritise. As members or supporters of political parties, we must use this opportunity to force the issue onto the agenda. For a ‘progressive alliance’ is now the only feasible alternative to continued Conservative government in 2020.

Any leader or leadership contender in any ‘progressive’ party who fails to recognise this risks ‘leading’ their party – and, more important still, their country – only into the dustbin of history.

Rupert Read was Green Party candidate for Cambridge at the 2015 General Election, and is Chair of Green House. He writes regularly for the Ecologist.

The report: Green House think tank’s new report on the progressive pact concept.

Thanks to Atus Mariqueo-Russell for research for this piece.

Globally the cut flower business is worth $100 billion a year, and according to fairtrade.org the main producers are the Netherlands, accounting for 55%, Columbia 18%, Ecuador 9% and Kenya 6%. The UK is the third largest consumer for cut blooms, pipped only by the USA and Germany.

Largely grown in glasshouses, 70% of the world’s flowers arrive via the Netherlands in one of three enormous flower “markets” – take for example the one million metre-squared Aalsmeer flower auction – which has the largest footprint of a building in the world, equating to 128 acres.

But travelling takes its toll on flowers. Not only do they require an enormous amount of energy to be cooled to 2 degrees, and put in a sleep-like trance, they are then sprayed with fungicide, x-rayed, put on a plane, and dipped in silver nitrate where they are mummified and lose all their scent, requiring the consumer to add a sachet of “life-giving” sugar solution to already four-day-old blooms.

Buying locally means that you are ensured a longer shelf life from your flowers, and your bouquet will remain smelling fragrant. It also means you get more choice as many delicate flowers such as sweet peas can’t cope with this process.

Claire Brown, owner of Surry flower farm Plant Passion, and volunteer at Gill Hodgson’s initiative Flowers From the Farm, grows more than 250 varieties for three main markets; local customers, florists and “DIY brides”, who buy the flowers and then create their own bouquets and displays.

With a background in horticulture, Claire seized an opportunity when she saw a gap in the market four years ago: “There has been huge growth in the industry. Before local growers started up there just hadn’t been a place for florists to buy their flowers.

“There were larger growers back in the 1970S but they would grow just one variety of flower. Because they grew such a vast amount, they had to go to market and to the wholesalers and it was very price dependent. When fuel prices went up it put them out of business.

“Fast forward 50 years and we have the Internet, SO we can go directly to the customer and there is such a good local market for this. There hasn’t been that ability to do that before.”

Flowers From the Farm now has more than 300 small flower growing businesses as members of a steadily growing community, and it’s a supportive one at that. Claire said: “Because all the flowers are grown locally to the area they are being sold in, you don’t have a high level of competition, in fact it would be handy to have more growers in the area to cover the demand but I have seen a couple come and go because actually it’s a very skilled job. It’s a hard physical job.”

With Claire’s flowers you know you are getting them at their very best. “I pick my flowers at 6am and they go in a dark barn. They are bought by my clients that afternoon. I don’t need to use chemicals or extra sugar food, and I’ve already got four days ahead of the supermarkets.”

Growing flowers in the British countryside sounds pretty idyllic but the rose-tinted idea of a flower grower’s life being easy is far removed from reality. Jan Waters from JW Blooms in Somerset works 80 hours a week with one other grower to grow, pick and create all the floristry for weddings and provide postal bouquets – she even runs a coffee shop that opens on Sundays.

With a gardening background Jan was inspired to get into growing in 2008 after she picked all the cornflowers from her allotment and saw the delighted reaction from people as she cycled home with them on her bike. “I realised I could sell them, and then I read about Jane Lindsey who started growing cut flowers on her smallholding in Scotland and thought, ‘if she can do it, so can I.'”

When she first set up Jan said she knew of about half a dozen other growers doing the same thing, but now there are huge numbers and it’s rising. “Sarah Raven was hugely influential and gave people the idea they could do this themselves. Over the past four years the industry has really grown. Gill Hodgson made a huge difference with Flowers From the Farm as well.”

There are some key differences to organically grown and glasshouse flowers, and the main one is the variety available to the buyer. Jan said: “The range of flowers I can offer is far greater as I can include flowers that can’t survive the packing process like lilies, roses or tulips can.

“We have just over an acre and in dahlias alone we have more than 40 different varieties.

They also smell amazing, whereas flowers that have been dipped have no fragrance. I don’t use chemicals, the only things I use to spray the flowers are garlic, chili, and sometimes a seaweed spray, so nothing that I wouldn’t eat myself. I dread to think of the chemicals that are sprayed on many of our imported flowers.”

Jan also shares a concern with many discerning consumers about the issue of waste packaging. Flowers that come into the supermarket are wrapped in cellophane, just one more thing that goes into land fill. “I don’t use packaging, and I don’t use the florists’ oasis bricks which are bad for the environment as well as they don’t biodegrade.”

British flower growers are reliant on the seasons, so the choice is more limited come Christmas and the winter months, however there are growers across the world who are appealing to the British taste for flowers year-round who do use organic and ethical methods of growing.

Rosabie Morton of The Real Flower Company helped to set up the Fairtrade rose farm in Nanyuki, Kenya, where roses are grown year-round, employs 500 local workers and utilises the empty space on scheduled passenger jets to carry their flowers, rather than cargo-only flights.

There will always be a place for year-round flowers, but British organic flower growers are offering a wider choice for the consumer and perhaps when you buy your blooms out of season, you’ll think more about what it took to produce them.

Rip currents are found along most coastlines, and where they form near popular beaches they can be deadly.

The journalist Decca Aitkenhead has written movingly about how quickly life can change after her husband was swept out to sea by a rip current while rescuing their son.

A rip current (sometimes incorrectly referred to as a rip tide) is a strong, narrow, fast-flowing current directed toward the sea that travels up to one to two metres per second. Rip currents usually develop close to the shoreline in very shallow water around a metre deep – just where beach bathers are usually found.

For rip currents to form, there must be areas close to the beach where some waves break and other areas where they do not. Usually this is caused by sandbars on the seabed that form from the sediment deposited by waves and tides. Waves are encouraged to break when travelling through the shallower water over the sandbars, but they don’t break when travelling through the regions of deeper water between them.

As waves enter the shallow water they ‘shoal’ – increase in height – and through their momentum they begin to force water towards the shoreline. Once the waves begin to break – so decrease in height – this momentum is reduced, opposed by another force known as a pressure gradient. This opposing pressure gradient causes the sea surface level to rise up by a few centimetres where the waves are breaking.

As the surface level of the sea where the waves are breaking over the sandbars is slightly higher than where the waves are not breaking, a current forms from water that is essentially flowing downhill from where it is higher to where it is lower. These are called feeder currents, and where they meet between sandbars their flow turns away from the shore and becomes the strong rip current that travels through the deeper water.

Why are they dangerous?

Rip currents are dangerous because they carry anything in the water seawards to deeper waters, and are not easy for swimmers to detect. In fact most bathers are not aware of the hazard they represent.

A bather in shallow water is likely to drift with the feeder currents along the shore without noticing, at which point they may be carried into the main rip current. Very quickly, they are carried out to sea and out to depths where waves may break over their heads. At this point bathers frequently panic, often with tragic results. Those attempting to swim back towards the shore against the rip current will quickly tire as the rip will generally be too strong even for the most competent swimmer.

While rip currents are caused by the action of waves they are also affected by the tides. Whether the tide is in or out will vary the depth of water over sandbars, effectively becoming a switch that turns wave breaking on and off as water depth rises and falls.

In Britain’s south-west, for example, sandbars are frequently found around the shoreline at low tide. For several hours low water waves break over these bars and cause rip currents, but as the tide rises the water depth over the bars increases, the wave breaking stops, and the rips become inactive. This repeats over the twice-daily tidal cycle, and is also regulated by the fortnightly cycle of spring tides and neap tides, which gives rip currents a semi-regular pattern.

Knowing this can keep you safe

Rip currents can be identified using complicated instrumentation, GPS-equipped drifter floats, or even by releasing coloured dye into the waters around the surf zone. But a simple trick to spot rip currents is to watch for the patterns of wave breaking visible from the shore.

Seen from a high vantage point such as a cliff above a beach, the contrast of intense white foam where waves are breaking versus the flat, dark waters of the rip current creates a characteristic pattern. In fact the same concept is used to identify rip currents using automated camera systems.

It’s worth remembering though that, somewhat counter-intuitively, bathers should head towards the surf, and stay clear of the dark, flat water under which the fast currents lurk – even though it looks more inviting.

And the safest beaches for bathers are those with a lifeguard, who are trained to recognise safe regions – their flagged areas and advice should always be followed.

Editor’s note: If you get caught up in a rip current, do not try to swim against it. Instead, swim parallel to the beach to reach an opposing current that will carry you back in again.

Martin Austin is Lecturer in Coastal Sediment Dynamics, Bangor University.

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

The first time I met with ‘Pati’ Ruiz Corzo was in central Mexico. We sat at her office, located in the deep mountains of the Sierra Gorda region and I must admit I arrived knowing very little about her, but driven by curiosity. I knew enough to know I would be meeting a highly respected woman and had a hunch that one way or another, she would become a true influence for the rest of my life. A woman of deep spirituality and clear determination with an incomparable passion and dedicated to the defence of what she considers to be her one and only treasure in life. A story anyone can learn from.

In 1986, ‘Pati’ Ruiz founded the Sierra Gorda Ecological Group (Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda), an organisation that today represents a unique model of community ‘conservation economy’. Her goal was to create a sustainable way of living for the more than 120,000 people living inside the Sierra Gorda Reserve, the most densely populated reserve in the entire country; a non-exclusive conservation programme. And so, she did – and still does this – by empowering the historically-marginated female population of the region.

These women have lived always having to keep quiet – oppressed and humiliated by a traditionally ‘macho’ society.  But today, as Pati explains, things have moved on:  “When you hear their motivation as they talk, and how happy they are to be receiving their own extra ‘cents’ per month and when you see that for the first time, some of the fathers have to stay home and take care of their kids because the women have to go work… well, that’s truly my ‘cherry on top of the cake.” Her ultimate goal is to see these women become the voice of conservation in the Sierra Gorda.

Pati Ruiz Corzo spent the first part of her life as a music teacher. In Queretaro, located two hours north of Mexico City, she had spent her time among the upper echelons of Mexican society. She married, had two kids, Beto and Mario, and lived a typically normal life, until one day, she and her husband, decided to leave the city, tired of what she calls ‘the extremes of modern society’.

 “For a long time, I’d put up with the dictates of being ‘modern’; searching for material success, social recognition, being a perfect housewife. There were times when these suffocating dogmas felt a heavy burden.” Pati was certain that she didn’t want her children growing up within a system she didn’t agree with.

”I rebelled against seeing my kids in competition for a ‘camouflaged’ knowledge and not a digested one. In school, their natural talents were being taken away in order to programme them for a stereotype, which I myself was opposed to. I was a teacher for too many years to not be able to see and understand how the gifts of the spirit and the character were being sterilised. Someone’s nature should be respected and should never be expected to accomplish a task imposed by others.”

Such decision was not easy. “I was afraid to leave the only lifestyle I knew, but I wanted to discover other values. I wanted to develop an intimate connection with nature – one that we had clearly lost. I heard shocking examples of kids saying that tomatoes were grown in the back of supermarket stores…my God, they don’t even know were milk comes from, but we can’t blame them for that.”

The Sierra Gorda Reserve has the highest levels of biodiversity in Mexico (the 5^th most biodiverse country in the world) with regions of semi desert, low jungle and a conifer forest that could easily pass for any Canadian landscape. In Pati’s words: ”This is were I found what’s truly real and valuable for me. Pure beauty… I found a treasure. Living surrounded by nature is a pleasure. It’s vibrant and alive. Here, there is no place for lies. We all live without labels”.

This is a woman who has the ability to inspire pretty much everyone that crosses her path. With an imposing charisma, Pati Ruiz manages to speak to large audiences without fear and she almost always ends a speech by singing – reminding us how she has kept alive what she valued the most of her past musical life. An emotional touch that brings pretty much everyone to tears.

She says she was welcomed from the start by the people of the Sierra Gorda. “I was well received from day one. I learned how to talk to them in a way which meant they wouldn’t feel a distance between us and I also brought my accordion with me ande I sang to them. That helped me build real solid bridges with the people of the Sierra Gorda.”

Today Pati Ruiz Corzo shares her passion for conservation and empowerment by holding workshops that attract people from all over the world. She focuses on sharing her message with those who initially were not interested by what she had to say.

When she started out she admits it took time to convince some people to share that journey with her. ”It took some time for some of them to believe me. It wasn’t easy but I felt that the local people just wanted someone to show how we could all move together. Now there’s a huge amount of will from the whole community to overcome all kinds of challenges we face.”

Pati fought not only to convince the local Sierra Gorda community that there was an urgent need to protect their natural heritage, but she has also had to stop many large outside interests and corporations from meddling into the affairs of this 300,000 hectare UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. A geographical isolated region, ideal for hidden and illegal activities to occur, such as mining and logging, underpinned by a country swamped by numerous corruption cases which has brought her into contact and conflict with just as many unsavoury individuals.

”I’ve fought all kinds of interests and individuals, some of them truly horrible. I’ve taken on Governors, the Ministry of Transport and the National Electricity Company. They’ve tried to build dams and highways and install high voltage cables. They’ve tried to take natural resources away from the local community, but as I tell them when I send them away; the only interest and objective of this territory is its total and genuine conservation! No one touches it!”

Clearly a position that has earned her more than a few enemies, especially in the Mexican government. “What they sign up for with international treaties should actually be carried out and not just written. They need to re-orientate public policies. There is a slow response from the Government; the politicians are not being efficient and even less farsighted. But I must say that we also lack a civil society capable of playing the role of a real auditor”.

Pati and her supporters are making headway. In the last five years, the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda has garnered numerous conservation awards including been awarded with the United Nations Champions of the Earth and the National Geographic World Legacy Award (2012, 2016).

“We adopt and adapt. We’ve try to work inter-institutionally with the local and federal governments, as well as other international organisations, even if it means that sometimes I’m forced to put on the pressure and convince them of many things they wouldn’t had done without our campaigning. You’ve no idea – it’s been like organising an anthill!

“We’ve also tried to create an active public spirit. Mexico is a ‘thirsty’ country with galloping desertification levels and we are a small but significant rescue team”. And her work is not only environmental and economic, but cultural too.

“We organise festivals part of one big cultural party made to recover our identity – to remember that we are not ‘Gringos‘ (North-Americans) but ‘Huastecos‘ (Huastec indigenous people). With so many people migrating north, there’s a strong transculturation phenomena. It’s important to feel you belong to a place.”

I stayed for a couple of weeks in the Sierra Gorda and saw the proof of the outcomes Pati talked about. More than a conservationist, she’s an activist in a country that lacks the courage to value such citizens and she’s an example in Mexico and abroad, to anyone who lacks the motivation to speak out and act on their own social conscience.

“Only civil society can change this situation,” she says. “Local answers are the only solution. We have to put our hearts and our dedication into the work and put pressure on local authorities to do the right thing. We have to innovate, do things with love and for the wellbeing of all. 

“I want a total revolution! A change of values where we seek full abundance for everyone, where we recognise nature as a vital part of our lives and where we learn to treat nature with respect and care. I don’t believe in accumulating more and more. What accumulates stagnates and what stagnates rots. I believe in the simplicity of life. Once you know the true value of what is sacred you’ll have the energy to keep going to make those changes.”

This Author:

Tadzio Mac Gregor was born in Mexico City to a French mother and a Mexican father. He has been involved with several social and environmental projects in Mexico, Asia and the Middle East. Having started working recently as a freelance journalist specializing in foreign affairs, environmental conservation and human development he now contributes to several newspapers in Mexico, France, Brazil and the United States

On July 28, the Prime Minister’s Office announced a delay until the autumn to allow a review to take place re the nuclear power station at Hinkley Point C proposed by the previous Government.

Since then, press criticisms of the mooted Hinkley C have continued unabated led by flagship editorials from the FT (add source) and The Economist.

These echo widespread concerns by the National Audit Office (NAO) in its recent preliminary report – Nuclear Power in the UK.

A detailed reading reveals serious question marks about the proposed project. According to The Times of July 31, the NAO will publish another damning report on Hinkley as soon as the Government has made its decision.

It would be infinitely preferable for the NAO’s considerations to be made available to the Government before legally binding decisions were taken on Hinkley C, rather than afterwards.

This is not a minor matter: the Government is understood to have ready a draft Investor Agreement – essentially an irrevocable contract for electricity from Hinkley C for 35 years at a cost of £29.7 billion to British energy consumers, as estimated in the above NAO report. This is a discounted sum: economists consider an undiscounted sum of about £37 billion should really be applied. Whichever figure is used, this is an unconscionable sum.

But it is not just the NAO which is concerned: other institutions including the Treasury’s National Infrastructure Commission, chaired by Lord Adonis, and its Infrastructure and Projects Authority. Members of Energy UK are also worried.

And two years ago, as stated in the UK Government’s report of October 8, 2014 to the European Commission on state aid for Hinkley, the then Infrastructure UK arm of the Treasury evaluated the Hinkley project as ‘Speculative BB+’.

Even this junk rating would have depended on the proper functioning of the proposed EPR at Flamanville in France which is by no means assured. In 2016, two years later, it is likely Hinkley’s investment rating will be even lower.

Labour’s Position on Hinkley Point C

Labour’s policy on Hinkley depends on who is speaking. In August 2015, Jeremy Corbyn set out a highly enlightened energy and environment manifesto which rejected new nuclear. More recently, the Shadow Leader of the House of Commons and Shadow Secretary of State for Wales, Paul Flynn MP, strongly opposed continued investment at Hinkley C.

However Corbyn’s appointment as Shadow spokesperson on energy matters, Barry Gardiner MP, remains supportive of Hinkley mainly because of trade union mantras on the need for jobs that Hinkley would provide. But these mantras are a shibboleth, defined as a long-standing belief which is widely regarded as outmoded or no longer related to the actual situation.

According to EdF Energy, only 900 direct permanent jobs would be created at Hinkley C, were it ever to be constructed. Even this is a likely overestimate, as on average UK nuclear power stations only employ about 600 workers. Although about 4,500 jobs would exist each year during any construction, EdF has admitted most would be temporary and filled by overseas workers.

And these permanent jobs would come at a hefty price. Independent analysts estimate each nuclear job at Hinkley would cost consumers an extra £800,000 per year compared to jobs in renewables in terms of increased costs of electricity.

Although ill-informed leaders of a few large unions support nuclear for jobs reasons, many trade unionists do not. The excellent 2014 report A Million Climate Jobs by 24 energy analysts and trade union officials reveals the large potential for jobs in the renewables and explicitly eschews nuclear power.

Trade union leaders may think that nuclear power is a major provider of jobs. It is not. The recent analysis of jobs in the energy sector published by the Office of National Statistics reveals only 15,500 direct jobs in nuclear power compared with 43,500 direct jobs in renewables – including renewable heat, renewable combined heat and power, bioenergy and alternative fuels in 2014.

Of course it may be that the four main unions backing nuclear power – GMB, Unite, Ucatt, and Prospect – do so not for the sake of jobs, but only for the sake of unionised jobs in the strongly unionised nuclear sector. That would be understandable – but if that’s the case they should admit the fact!

UK renewables already emply three times as many people as nuclear

In fact, the ONS figure is flattering, as about 9,000 of the 15,500 workers are engaged in nuclear reprocessing at Sellafield in Cumbria. The reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel is a filthy, dangerous, polluting and essentially useless activity which produces not a single watt of electricity and consumes a great deal of it. It also accounts for most of NDA’s whopping ~£90 billion annual operating bill which taxpayers are forced to pay. We shall return to the nonsense of nuclear reprocessing in a future article.

If we accept the ONS estimate, the renewables sector employs about three times as many people as nuclear. In future it is clear this ratio will increase as the number of nuclear jobs is declining with the closure of old nuclear power stations.

On the other hand, the numbers of permanent new jobs in the renewables industries are increasing by leaps and bounds. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) in 2015, renewables employed 7.7 million people worldwide, with 650,000 in Europe, including 370,000 in Germany and 160,000 in France.

The IRENA estimates are for both direct and indirect jobs and there is some uncertainty in the methods used to derive them. However it is quite clear that they are pointing in the right direction.

No estimates are yet available for both direct and indirect jobs in the UK energy sector, but the ONS has stated it is working on this. Indirect jobs are usually estimated by multiplying the direct jobs number with an increase factor. This means that the number of indirect UK jobs created in the renewables sector will be much larger than the number of indirect jobs in the nuclear sector.

Hinkley C a financial disaster and poor job-creator

All things considered, Hinkley C would be a remarkably poor bet for Britain. Industry insiders expect 90% of the work at Hinkley, and all hi-tech work, would go to French firms. For example, in 2013 EDF Energy completed a very large gas-fired power station at West Burton in Nottinghamshire where 100% of the engineering contracts (even the concrete) went to French firms.

In addition, pro-nuclear unions seem to be unaware that public support for Hinkley is declining. It fell from 57% in October 2013 to 33% in April this year, according to polling conducted on behalf of a pro-nuclear organisation. The report added “the growing level of public hostility to the £18 billion Hinkley project comes amid concern over its cost for UK consumers and a series of delays.” This is not an isolated poll; other local surveys indicate the same.

These unions also appear to be unaware that it was only in May 2006 that Mr Blair changed Labour’s policy on nuclear: before then, Labour and the unions (including the TUC) had been pro-renewables and openly sceptical on nuclear. It is time for the unions and some senior MPs in the Labour Party to wake up to the reality that nuclear furnishes few UK jobs, and that Hinkley C would not be a major jobs provider.

Instead they should give their support exclusively to renewables which are already a major jobs provider and in future will become an even greater one – all the more so if we seize the opportunites quickly and develop a global export trade in key renewable energy technologies.

Dr Ian Fairlie is an independent consultant on environmental radioactivity. He formerly was a senior scientist in the Civil Service and worked for the TUC as a researcher between 1975 and 1990.