British scientists have just discovered one of the richest stores of carbon on Earth: 145,000 square kilometres of peatland – an area larger than England – in the forests of the central Congo basin.

The reservoir of compressed plant material holds at least 30 Gt (billion tonnes) of carbon. And this pristine and undisturbed sink of peat is the equivalent of about two decades of fossil fuel combustion in the United States.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is significant for three reasons. One is that it adds a substantial new component to one of the most head-scratching problems in climate science: the arithmetic of the carbon cycle, a cycle vital both to all living things and to climate machinery.

The second is a reminder that, in a world combed by geographers and topographers, monitored for 30 years by dozens of orbiting satellites, and explored and exploited by more than 7 billion people, there is still scope for important discovery.

Third, if this carbon store is opened up to development, it could end up emitting a massive volume of CO₂ with disastrous results for global climate. This is already happening in Indonesia, where huge areas of peatland swamp forest are being logged, drained, burnt and cleared for oil palm plantations, making the country the world’s fifth biggest carbon emitter.

‘The largest peatland complex in the tropics’

“Our research shows that the peat in the central Congo Basin covers a colossal amount of land. It is 16 times larger than the previous estimate and is the single largest peatland complex found anywhere in the tropics”, said Simon Lewis, a geographer at the University of Leeds, and one of the discoverers.

“We have also found 30 billion tonnes of carbon that nobody knew existed. The peat covers only 4% of the whole Congo Basin, but stores the same amount of carbon below ground as that stored above ground in the trees covering the other 96%.

“These peatlands hold nearly 30% of the world’s tropical peatland carbon, that’s about 20 years of the fossil fuel emissions of the United States of America.”

Working with Congolese colleagues, Professor Lewis and his co-author Greta Dargie discovered the peatlands in 2012, during a field trip to the swamps of the Cuvette Centrale at the heart of one of the world’s last remaining great forests in the Republic of the Congo.

They found a vast extent of dense peat around two metres in depth – and sometimes almost six metres – and used space-based instrument measurements to map an extent of 145,000 sq km.

Stores of buried peat should be no great surprise in the wetlands of a tropical rainforest: swamp water would prevent organic decay, and peat would build up, as it has for instance in the rainforests of Borneo. But the scale of this carbon sink is unprecedented.

Coal in formation

The carbon sink in the African peatlands is preserved plant material stored over huge periods of time. Plants photosynthesise tissue from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; humans and animals and fungi consume the plants and return most of the carbon to the atmosphere.

A residue, however, is preserved in the soil, as semi-decayed wood or foliage, or on the seabed as the carbon shells and bones of sea creatures, and this difference between source and sink is what perplexes climate scientists. 

They need to know how to work out, in ever finer detail, the rate at which the world will warm as a consequence of two centuries of combustion of fossil fuels – because oil and coal and natural gas were also once living tissue, made by ancient photosynthesis.

So researchers have tried to assess the quantities of soil carbon stored as peat under the thawing Arctic permafrost, they have asked themselves questions about the impact of wildfires in the world’s forests, they have tried to complete the intricate arithmetic of the effect of climate change on how much carbon the forests can absorb, and on the overall impact of global warming on the world’s grasslands and savannahs.

And at every point, they have found new riddles to solve: are the oceans responding to climate change by gulping down more carbon? What role do fungi have in the uptake of carbon in the soil? And why are the world’s fjordlands so important as carbon reservoirs? So the Congo basin discovery adds a new dimension to the calculations.

Radiocarbon evidence suggests the carbon sink has been accumulating for the last 10,600 years, and the discovery increases the best estimate so far of tropical peatland by up to 36%.

Protection is urgent

Now, the next step is to find ways to protect the find, says Professor Lewis: “Peatlands are only a resource in the fight against climate change when left intact, and so maintaining large stores of carbon in undisturbed peatlands should be a priority.

Our new results show that carbon has been building up in the Congo Basin’s peat for nearly 11,000 years. If the Congo Basin peatland complex was to be destroyed, this would release billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.”

Dr Dargie added: “With so many of the world’s tropical peatlands under threat from land development, and the need to reduce carbon emissions to zero over the coming decades, it is essential that the Congo Basin peatlands remain intact.”

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network, where this article was originally published (CC BY-NC-ND).

British scientists have just discovered one of the richest stores of carbon on Earth: 145,000 square kilometres of peatland – an area larger than England – in the forests of the central Congo basin.

The reservoir of compressed plant material holds at least 30 Gt (billion tonnes) of carbon. And this pristine and undisturbed sink of peat is the equivalent of about two decades of fossil fuel combustion in the United States.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is significant for three reasons. One is that it adds a substantial new component to one of the most head-scratching problems in climate science: the arithmetic of the carbon cycle, a cycle vital both to all living things and to climate machinery.

The second is a reminder that, in a world combed by geographers and topographers, monitored for 30 years by dozens of orbiting satellites, and explored and exploited by more than 7 billion people, there is still scope for important discovery.

Third, if this carbon store is opened up to development, it could end up emitting a massive volume of CO₂ with disastrous results for global climate. This is already happening in Indonesia, where huge areas of peatland swamp forest are being logged, drained, burnt and cleared for oil palm plantations, making the country the world’s fifth biggest carbon emitter.

‘The largest peatland complex in the tropics’

“Our research shows that the peat in the central Congo Basin covers a colossal amount of land. It is 16 times larger than the previous estimate and is the single largest peatland complex found anywhere in the tropics”, said Simon Lewis, a geographer at the University of Leeds, and one of the discoverers.

“We have also found 30 billion tonnes of carbon that nobody knew existed. The peat covers only 4% of the whole Congo Basin, but stores the same amount of carbon below ground as that stored above ground in the trees covering the other 96%.

“These peatlands hold nearly 30% of the world’s tropical peatland carbon, that’s about 20 years of the fossil fuel emissions of the United States of America.”

Working with Congolese colleagues, Professor Lewis and his co-author Greta Dargie discovered the peatlands in 2012, during a field trip to the swamps of the Cuvette Centrale at the heart of one of the world’s last remaining great forests in the Republic of the Congo.

They found a vast extent of dense peat around two metres in depth – and sometimes almost six metres – and used space-based instrument measurements to map an extent of 145,000 sq km.

Stores of buried peat should be no great surprise in the wetlands of a tropical rainforest: swamp water would prevent organic decay, and peat would build up, as it has for instance in the rainforests of Borneo. But the scale of this carbon sink is unprecedented.

Coal in formation

The carbon sink in the African peatlands is preserved plant material stored over huge periods of time. Plants photosynthesise tissue from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; humans and animals and fungi consume the plants and return most of the carbon to the atmosphere.

A residue, however, is preserved in the soil, as semi-decayed wood or foliage, or on the seabed as the carbon shells and bones of sea creatures, and this difference between source and sink is what perplexes climate scientists. 

They need to know how to work out, in ever finer detail, the rate at which the world will warm as a consequence of two centuries of combustion of fossil fuels – because oil and coal and natural gas were also once living tissue, made by ancient photosynthesis.

So researchers have tried to assess the quantities of soil carbon stored as peat under the thawing Arctic permafrost, they have asked themselves questions about the impact of wildfires in the world’s forests, they have tried to complete the intricate arithmetic of the effect of climate change on how much carbon the forests can absorb, and on the overall impact of global warming on the world’s grasslands and savannahs.

And at every point, they have found new riddles to solve: are the oceans responding to climate change by gulping down more carbon? What role do fungi have in the uptake of carbon in the soil? And why are the world’s fjordlands so important as carbon reservoirs? So the Congo basin discovery adds a new dimension to the calculations.

Radiocarbon evidence suggests the carbon sink has been accumulating for the last 10,600 years, and the discovery increases the best estimate so far of tropical peatland by up to 36%.

Protection is urgent

Now, the next step is to find ways to protect the find, says Professor Lewis: “Peatlands are only a resource in the fight against climate change when left intact, and so maintaining large stores of carbon in undisturbed peatlands should be a priority.

Our new results show that carbon has been building up in the Congo Basin’s peat for nearly 11,000 years. If the Congo Basin peatland complex was to be destroyed, this would release billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.”

Dr Dargie added: “With so many of the world’s tropical peatlands under threat from land development, and the need to reduce carbon emissions to zero over the coming decades, it is essential that the Congo Basin peatlands remain intact.”

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network, where this article was originally published (CC BY-NC-ND).

British scientists have just discovered one of the richest stores of carbon on Earth: 145,000 square kilometres of peatland – an area larger than England – in the forests of the central Congo basin.

The reservoir of compressed plant material holds at least 30 Gt (billion tonnes) of carbon. And this pristine and undisturbed sink of peat is the equivalent of about two decades of fossil fuel combustion in the United States.

The discovery, reported in the journal Nature, is significant for three reasons. One is that it adds a substantial new component to one of the most head-scratching problems in climate science: the arithmetic of the carbon cycle, a cycle vital both to all living things and to climate machinery.

The second is a reminder that, in a world combed by geographers and topographers, monitored for 30 years by dozens of orbiting satellites, and explored and exploited by more than 7 billion people, there is still scope for important discovery.

Third, if this carbon store is opened up to development, it could end up emitting a massive volume of CO₂ with disastrous results for global climate. This is already happening in Indonesia, where huge areas of peatland swamp forest are being logged, drained, burnt and cleared for oil palm plantations, making the country the world’s fifth biggest carbon emitter.

‘The largest peatland complex in the tropics’

“Our research shows that the peat in the central Congo Basin covers a colossal amount of land. It is 16 times larger than the previous estimate and is the single largest peatland complex found anywhere in the tropics”, said Simon Lewis, a geographer at the University of Leeds, and one of the discoverers.

“We have also found 30 billion tonnes of carbon that nobody knew existed. The peat covers only 4% of the whole Congo Basin, but stores the same amount of carbon below ground as that stored above ground in the trees covering the other 96%.

“These peatlands hold nearly 30% of the world’s tropical peatland carbon, that’s about 20 years of the fossil fuel emissions of the United States of America.”

Working with Congolese colleagues, Professor Lewis and his co-author Greta Dargie discovered the peatlands in 2012, during a field trip to the swamps of the Cuvette Centrale at the heart of one of the world’s last remaining great forests in the Republic of the Congo.

They found a vast extent of dense peat around two metres in depth – and sometimes almost six metres – and used space-based instrument measurements to map an extent of 145,000 sq km.

Stores of buried peat should be no great surprise in the wetlands of a tropical rainforest: swamp water would prevent organic decay, and peat would build up, as it has for instance in the rainforests of Borneo. But the scale of this carbon sink is unprecedented.

Coal in formation

The carbon sink in the African peatlands is preserved plant material stored over huge periods of time. Plants photosynthesise tissue from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; humans and animals and fungi consume the plants and return most of the carbon to the atmosphere.

A residue, however, is preserved in the soil, as semi-decayed wood or foliage, or on the seabed as the carbon shells and bones of sea creatures, and this difference between source and sink is what perplexes climate scientists. 

They need to know how to work out, in ever finer detail, the rate at which the world will warm as a consequence of two centuries of combustion of fossil fuels – because oil and coal and natural gas were also once living tissue, made by ancient photosynthesis.

So researchers have tried to assess the quantities of soil carbon stored as peat under the thawing Arctic permafrost, they have asked themselves questions about the impact of wildfires in the world’s forests, they have tried to complete the intricate arithmetic of the effect of climate change on how much carbon the forests can absorb, and on the overall impact of global warming on the world’s grasslands and savannahs.

And at every point, they have found new riddles to solve: are the oceans responding to climate change by gulping down more carbon? What role do fungi have in the uptake of carbon in the soil? And why are the world’s fjordlands so important as carbon reservoirs? So the Congo basin discovery adds a new dimension to the calculations.

Radiocarbon evidence suggests the carbon sink has been accumulating for the last 10,600 years, and the discovery increases the best estimate so far of tropical peatland by up to 36%.

Protection is urgent

Now, the next step is to find ways to protect the find, says Professor Lewis: “Peatlands are only a resource in the fight against climate change when left intact, and so maintaining large stores of carbon in undisturbed peatlands should be a priority.

Our new results show that carbon has been building up in the Congo Basin’s peat for nearly 11,000 years. If the Congo Basin peatland complex was to be destroyed, this would release billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.”

Dr Dargie added: “With so many of the world’s tropical peatlands under threat from land development, and the need to reduce carbon emissions to zero over the coming decades, it is essential that the Congo Basin peatlands remain intact.”

Tim Radford writes for Climate News Network, where this article was originally published (CC BY-NC-ND).

Can degrowth enter into the Parliaments? How large would its constituency be? What policy proposals shall be put forward? How could a synergy be built between grassroots social movements and institutional politics?

These are some of the questions that have been on the table in Europe for a decade – at least since 2008 when the first international degrowth conference took place in Paris. In 2009 Tim Jackson published an influential report title Prosperity without growth? as chair of the UK sustainable development commission. Professor Jackson, a central figure of the beyond growth debate, has recently promoted the ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group (AAPG) on limits to growth‘ with the support of the Green Party and the MP Caroline Lucas (a kind of political miracle, given the British electoral system), among others. The AAPG aims to “create the space for cross-party dialogue on environmental and social limits to growth; to assess the evidence for such limits, identify the risks and build support for appropriate responses; and to contribute to the international debate on redefining prosperity”. It is part of a long tradition of promoting a post-growth agenda within parliaments in Europe, most recently with the parliamentary commissions in France (Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress) and Germany (Enquete commission on Growth, Prosperity, Quality of Life).

Among its other activities, this AAPG organizes debates at the House of Commons and I recently had the chance to join one of these, entitled The end of growth? Which was moderated by Tim Jackson and Caroline Lucas and which asked  the question: “is there still a role for economic growth in delivering a sustainable prosperity?“.

Panellists included Kate Raworth (author of Doughnut Economics), Jørgen Randers (co-author of the 1972 Limits to Growth study) and Graeme Maxton (Secretary General of the Club of Rome). The 100 tickets made available to listen to the debate sold out in a few hours. And I think there was a general consensus among panellists that economic growth, rather than a panacea to solve all social problems is itself a problem, if not directly a cause for many other problems.

The panellists brought in different arguments to demonstrate that economic growth is ecological unsustainable, socially undesirable and that it might have come to an end (i.e. secular stagnation). In a nutshell, we quickly removed the question mark from the title of debate: growth has indeed come to an end.

Now, although we broadly agreed on the diagnosis, differences emerged when discussing the prognosis, or what I would call the politics of sustainable degrowth: What has to be done? How are we going to do it? Who is going to do it? And for whom?

The consensus with the audience was that we face many unresolved challenges: How does social change happen? How do we scale up grassroots alternatives? How do we position ourselves in relation to capitalism? How would we envision a socio-ecological transformation in low-income countries? What are the obstacles? How do we make the welfare state sustainable? How do we avoid co-optation? And so on…

Overall, the debate was to the point. I’m told it even continued at a pub later on, along the lines of the British cultural tradition. I unfortunately missed that. I found a nice balance among the panellists themselves, although I missed someone bringing in a feminist perspective. For example, I had a nice exchange of opinions on the role of democracy with Jørgen Randers. We were the youngest and oldest panellists, respectively. Randers brought in the experience and authority of someone that has been in these debates for almost 50 years, but who is somehow now disillusioned. I hopefully brought in the enthusiasm of the ‘youth’ (sic), and I was rightly reminded that we are not reinventing the wheel. The newcomers, like myself, definitively stand on the shoulders of our predecessors. However, during the debate I did my best to make the case for degrowth, and argue that we need to focus on degrowth and not just limits to growth, or moving ‘beyond’ growth. Let me explain how I understand degrowth.

In the article What is degrowth?, we conclude that “Generally degrowth challenges the hegemony of growth and calls for a democratically led redistributive downscaling of production and consumption in industrialised countries as a means to achieve environmental sustainability, social justice and wellbeing.”

Degrowth is not an end, but a means. The focus should be not only on less but on different (See accompanying image to this piece). Degrowth, as a term, was first used by Andre Gorz in 1972. It was then launched as an activist slogan in France at the beginning the 2000s in reaction to the failure of sustainable development, seen as an oxymoron.

Degrowth is the hypothesis that we can live well with less. It is about imagining and enacting alternative visions to modern growth-based development. Alternative, better, or greener development is simply not enough – including sustainable development and all its reincarnations such as green economy, green growth or circular economy. Else, economic growth is not compatible with sustainability, no matter how you rephrase it.

However, degrowth is not only about ecological sustainability. In London, I stressed that its prognosis (why degrowth?) includes a variety of sources, such as democracy, justice, meaning of life, spirituality and care. We shall not compromise on any of these. For example, the theory of degrowth rules out entertaining the possibility of an ecological dictatorship in the name of enforcing limits that people otherwise are not willing to voluntary impose upon themselves. The socio-ecological transformation has to come from the people, and to the people, or it won’t happen. So any definition of degrowth must take into account all these concerns

Degrowth as a word is an act of détournement (French for “rerouting” or “hijacking”); a technique developed in the 1950s by the Situationist International consisting in turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself. Today’s most famous example is the work done by Adbusters in modifying advertisements in order to subvert their meaning. Some see degrowth as punk, but the battle will have been won when the ideas behind degrowth have become pop(ular) and changed the imagination and commonsense of everyone, not just the punks. This is hard work and people like Kate Raworth or Tim Jackson have done the most on bringing the degrowth concept to the mainstream, including into the Parliaments.  

But is such a political entry possible? Degrowth has certainly already had an impact, at least in South Europe, where prime ministers like Nicolas Sarkozy and Matteo Renzi felt at least the need to address it, even if only to dismiss it. Widely debated in the media, at the moment it receives the support of at least three contemporary European political leaders, including Juan Carlos Monedero of Podemos in Spain, Beppe Grillo of Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy and Benoit Hamon, ex minister of social and solidarity economy and current candidate for the French Parti socialiste presidential primary.

Elsewhere it is happening too; for example the senator Cristovam Buarque praised degrowth at the Brazilian congress in 2010. This is not so much a new phenomenon, but a revival of the 1970s limits to growth debate. For example, in 1972 Sicco Mansholt, a Dutch social-democrat who was then EU Commissioner for agriculture, wrote a letter to the President Malfatti, urging him to seriously take into account limits to growth in the EU economic policy. Mansholt himself became President after only two months, but for a too short term to push a zero (or below) growth agenda.

There is no doubt that there are numerous obstacles for degrowth to make headways to politics. However, the ongoing 2008 financial crisis has helped revive this debate, and has deeply changed citizens’ opinion about the economy. A recent study by colleagues on the public views on the relation between economic growth, the environment and prosperity in Spain shows that although a majority still views growth and environmental sustainability as compatible (green growth), about one-third prefers either ignoring growth as a policy aim (agrowth), or stopping it altogether (degrowth). Only very few people want growth unconditionally (growth-at-all-costs). Difficult to determine what drives citizens’ opinion, and whether Pope Francis pleading for degrowth helps. The question remains why if there is a ‘constituency; of a sort that is willing to entertain the critique of degrowth, why are there so few politicians daring to speak to it?

Last autumn, we organized a debate in Budapest on ‘degrowth in the parliaments‘ with four MPs from different EU countries discussing the challenges they have faced promoting degrowth within their parties and parliaments (it can be watched here). There are also efforts of developing degrowth policy proposals, like the ones by the collective Research & Degrowth, to which I belong. I shall also mention the field of ecological macroeconomics, of which Tim Jackson is a prominent figure. For example, we – at Research & Degrowth – are working on a macroeconomic model based on Tim’s models to explore the opportunities of generating employment in a post-growth scenario in the EU. Our book, Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, (now published in ten languages), explores some of those opportunities and also ideas around a basic income, debt audit, public money, work time reduction and work sharing.

In conclusion, let me outline our hypothesis. If growth has been a central pillar of stability in wealthy countries throughout the 20^th century, then it is reasonable to argue that its lack in growth-oriented societies might create instability. I propose to read under this light too, but of course not only, the recent emerging political conjuncture, from Trump to Brexit, including a generalized rise of the authoritarian right.

Even the IMF argues that we might have entered into a new phase of low growth potential, especially in wealthy economies. This has been called New Normal, New Mediocre, or Secular Stagnation. The Wall Street Journal recently argued that: “In Europe, as in the U.S., voters are angry at political elites and frustrated by slow growth”. This places the end of growth right at the centre of 21^st Century politics – inside and outside the parliaments.

For how long will we keep sacrificing everything in the name of growth, with austerity policies? How far will the mainstream be able to support growth’s mirage? And how – and who – is going to challenge the discontent emerging out of slow growth in growth’s societies? Can we give this frustration a new meaning and direction, other than that of closure and phobia?

Welcome to the new era of post-growth politics. As Tim Jackson and Peter Victor argued in The New York Times: “Imagining a world without growth is among the most vital and urgent tasks for society to engage in.”

So we start a new year with the knowledge that degrowth has now entered into the Parliament, and hopefully it is here to stay. We have just started and we recognise the challenges remain huge and sometimes seem insurmountable. The degrowth community wants to face the challenges. And in the House of Commons I was pleased to see we share the challenges and the tasks ahead with powerful companions.

This Author

Federico Demaria is an ecological economist at the Environmental Science and Technology Institute, Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is a member of Research & Degrowth, and co-editor of Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, (Routledge, 2015; vocabulary.degrowth.org). 

Study results, published in the Journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences show that the understanding of animals and their physical traits is vital to saving tropical ecosystems.

According to the research, understanding land-use change is important because tropical forests are integral to the long-term stability of global air quality and climate cycles. The health of tropical forests is reliant on biodiversity – and is helped by animals spreading seeds to regenerate growth. In fact it is thought 90% of tropical tree and shrub species rely on animals for seed dispersal.

Lead author of the study Dr Tom Bregman of Oxford University and the Global Canopy Programme, says: “We provide compelling evidence that the loss of tropical bird species following land use change will disrupt both seed dispersal and rates of insect herbivory, both regulated by birds. This has important implications for the ability of tropical forests to recover from human activities including deforestation.”

Scientists worked across 330 locations in different habitat types varying from soybean fields to undisturbed forest with a team of scientists looking at potential change on two ecosystem processes for which birds play important roles, specifically with regard to seed dispersal and insect predation.

According to Dr Alexander Lees, one of the scientists involved in the research from Manchester Metropolitan University, the study is extremely timely: “Understanding the implications of the loss of bird species for ecosystem function is crucial to our understanding of the future trajectories of Amazonian landscapes, he said.

Data on bird community composition, collected by the Sustainable Amazon Network, was reviwed together with data on bird morphology from museum specimens to look at the ‘functional trait structure’ of Amazonian forest bird communities – size, diet, wing and tails, and their occurrence across habitats. Data from bird specimens deposited in museums in Brazil, the UK and the USA was also used.

The team recorded that a loss of birds cuts the chance of forests bouncing back from deforestation. It is the birds’ physical traits, such as beak or tail size, which provide a window for scientists to assess the impact of environmental change.

Results suggest that local extinctions of birds caused by the loss and degradation of their tropical forest habitats are not random with respect to the bird’s traits. For example, the loss of large-billed and long-winged species in agricultural landscapes and in regenerating secondary forests means that certain large-seeded tree species will likely not have their seeds dispersed in future.

The loss of certain kinds of insectivorous bird species will also mean a lack of control of herbivorous insects, many of which can be pests in agricultural landscapes. The distribution of the species and their traits can then be used to assess whether we maintain or lose ecosystem functionality as land-use change intensifies.

Dr Joseph Tobias, of Imperial College London, says: “The ‘biodiversity services’ that tropical forest birds supply are crucial for forests to function properly. Our work shows that they are more effectively retained in primary forests that have not been completely cleared, rather than secondary forests regenerating after total clearance.” He added that these services collapse in agricultural land-uses such as pasture and arable.

Dr Lees adds: “Data from specimens held in natural history museums underpinned this study; yet these institutions are often woefully underfunded and undervalued, despite being crucial for efforts to catalogue and understand global biodiversity.”

Understanding the provisioning of key ecosystem processes such as seed dispersal and control of herbivory will help to understand whether tropical forests will have impaired or reduced resilience in future. If this is the case, forests damaged by fire and logging are unlikely to come back strongly because species have been lost that assist in the process.

Eliminating wild fires, reducing the impact of logging and enforcing the protection of hunted species will help to maintain the health of these ecosystem processes and the forests that depend on them.

This Author

Laura Briggs is the Ecologist’s UK news reporter specialising in reporting on ecology and the environment. You can follow her here @WordsbyBriggs

There will be many obituaries published about this extraordinary Russian scientist, activist and human being, but I would like to briefly record a few words about the man I knew. And to weep a few tears.

He was a strong a friend and fellow fighter for truth, and his recent death on the evening of January 10th means a lot for me – and (though we may nto know it) for us all on this increasingly contaminated planet.

I first met Alexey in Oxford in 1996, shortly after publishing my book Wings of Death, which he had already read. What was clear immediately then, and increasingly through our work together since then, is that he, like me, saw the issue of radiation and health as one which was fundamentally a political one, and only secondarily as scientific.

In 1998 we were among those few independent scientists invited by the Green Group in the European Parliament to Brussels to advise on the transposition of the Euratom 96/29 Basic Safety Standards Directive.

This pan-European law permitted the dilution of radioactive waste into consumer goods, and we advised the Greens to try and block it. Well they could not, as Euratom cannot be blocked by the Parliament; though they did manage to introduce a suicide clause, one which we have recently begun to employ.

Fateful words that led to the ECRR’s foundation

Also at this meeting was Jack Valentin, the Scientific Secretary of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP). After we had all soundly attacked the ICRP for ignoring the effects coming out from Chernobyl, Jack Valentin huffily said:

“ICRP is an independent organisation. It has no special status. You can listen to any committee you want!”

At this suggestion, Alexey and I immediately saw the way forward. With Inge Schmitz-Feuerhake, Alice Stewart and (later) Molly Scott Cato we decided to form an alternative ICRP: the European Committee on Radiation Risk (ECRR). [1]

This needed an alternative radiation risk model, and we worked on this over the next five years to create the first ECRR report which was published in 2003 and rose upon the nuclear industry horizon with the brightness of a thousand suns.

Alexey organised the translation into Russian, and it quickly appeared also in French, Japanese and Spanish. Alexey suggested we publish a series of books and ECRR reports, and quickly began to put together the first compilation of evidence on Chernobyl effects which we published together in 2006: Chernobyl 20 Years On: Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident. [2]

A valiant warrior for scientific truth

By then we had persuaded Michael Meacher to set up the doomed Committee Examining Radiation Risk from Internal Emitters (CERRIE) and in 2004 we got Alexey over to Oxford, together with Prof Elena Burlakova from the Russian Academy of Sciences to dish the dirt on Chernobyl, which they did.

All their presentations were omitted by the nuclear industry-biased CERRIE secretariat from the final report, though we put them into the Minority Report. Alexey went on to publish, with the late Wassily Nesterenko (and Alexey Nesterenko) the now famous New York Academy of Sciences Chernobyl book which the nuclear industry stooges now spend their time attacking.

In 2000 I was with him in Kiev at the World Health Organisation conference. He used to get really angry. You can see him in action in the Tchertkoff documentary Atomic Lies, which covered the stitch-ups at that Kiev meeting. [3] This is a powerful record, well worth watching.

In 2009 he came to the Lesvos conference of the ECRR and made a presentation on Chernobyl effects which we published in the Proceedings. [4] Later we were in Geneva together and stood vigil together outside the World Health organisation with our sandwich boards. It was freezing. We took the message all over the place. Even after he became ill and had various operations he would struggle along somehow: we were there in East Berlin, talking about Fukushima. [5]

Campaigning on all fronts

What Alexey, Inge and I had in common was the realisation that to win this battle we had to act in several domains: in the scientific literature, in the political area and in the legal arena also. We had to be brave and accept the attacks and the lies spread about us.

We wrote up the science in books and reports and we began publishing in the peer-reviewed literature; we developed the alternative risk model and entered into court cases as experts and finally in my own case as the legal representative. And it worked: between us we have shaken the foundations of the current bogus structure. And I believe we will ultimately win.

I last saw him in Moscow in 2015 at his 80th birthday celebration to which he invited me (and paid my ticket). A sort of vodka-fuelled scientific congress. The only other English speaker there was Tim Mousseau. The Russian scientists there were so clever. So honest. Such a change from all the time-serving bastards and idiots I meet in the radiation risk community venues like CERRIE or more recently the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. We hugged and cried and tossed back the vodka.

But now … they have all gone. Karl Z Morgan, John Gofman, Ed Radford, Ernest Sternglass, Alice Stewart, Rosalie Bertell and now Alexey. All my old mates. Where are the young scientists to replace them? Nowhere. It is all brush and spin and jobs now.

So: Goodbye Alexey Vladimirovitch. A brave and powerful presence, a big man in every way. Perhaps the last of the warrior scientists.

Chris Busby is an expert on the health effects of ionizing radiation. He qualified in Chemical Physics at the Universities of London and Kent, and worked on the molecular physical chemistry of living cells for the Wellcome Foundation. Professor Busby is the Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk based in Brussels and has edited many of its publications since its founding in 1998. He has held a number of honorary University positions, including Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Health of the University of Ulster. Busby currently lives in Riga, Latvia.

See also: chrisbusbyexposed.org, greenaudit.org and llrc.org.

Notes

1. Note the original site www.euradcom.org was hacked and manipulated. It is now controlled by an entity in Canada and is not to be trusted. We had to set up a new site and a mirror site www.euradcom.net The servers are in Latvia.

2. This was reprinted and can be ordered from Amazon UK. The book will be made available as a free download from euradcom.eu.

3. Nuclear Controversies (Originally entitled ‘Atomic Lies’). I helped with some translations. The little girl at the beginning never fails to make everyone cry.

4. Fukushima – What to Expect. Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference of the ECRR. Ed Chris Busby, Joseph Busby, Cecilia Busby Ditta Rietuma. Aberystwyth: Green Audit 2012. We will put this up on the ECRR website soon as a free download.

5. Yablokov and Busby in Berlin: Fukushima and Chernobyl; video by Ditta Rietuma.

Don’t you hate it when, out for a country walk, you come across poo bags swinging in trees? What is it with dog walkers who think it acceptable to leave plastic-wrapped turds dangling like forgotten Christmas baubles? Or chucked into a canal?

Such obnoxious behaviour by irresponsible dog owners is an obvious environmental impact of Britain’s increasing pooch population.

There are an estimated 8.5 million canines in our small island today. To produce all that offending ordure, I work out that 8.5 million dogs – a worrying number of them obese – must wolf down about 2,000 tonnes of food daily.

A typical tinned and processed dog food includes ‘by-products’ of the human food industry including testicles, udders and chicken feet, all cooked up with maize, wheat, brewer’s yeast and fish oil. Don’t like the sound of that? There is a growing market for raw dog food that the manufacturers proudly announce is good enough for owners to eat (after cooking it first I imagine.)

Raw, organic, free range chicken, beef or pork is mixed with (organic) vegetables. I’m sure Buster loves it and it keeps him very healthy but meat is an inefficient use of land for my dinner – let alone the dog’s. There are vegetarian and vegan dog foods of course. These include such treats as baobab seeds and coconut oil. The food miles! And what about the associated carbon emissions of the multi-million pound pet industry churning out 101 varieties of dog toys, beds, brushes and doggy hairdryers? Can dog ownership ever be an option for a committed environmentalist? Is it sustainable? It seems that the answer is a resounding ‘No1′. Which is a shame – as I’d really, really like a dog.

There Is A Dog-Shapped Hole In My Life

I live alone on a narrowboat, trying to lead a low-impact life, making amends for years of jetting around the world as a travel writer. I don’t see this basic, off-grid, low-emissions life as a kind of penance, rather it is a joy. There are 2,000 miles of waterways on which I cruise my 55ft long home. My home is an island – a floating one. I am home and away, dwelling and travelling.

In six years of living aboard I’ve travelled the length of England and crossed the Penines twice. My preferred mooring spots are rural. Cruising, for just an hour each day, heats the water and recharges the batteries, literally and metaphorically. I love this nomadic watery life and, being an introvert, find contentment in solitude. Friends and family are scattered around the country. We meet up when I am near. I have a living-apart-together relationship. I rarely feel lonely but for a while now there has been a dog-shaped hole in my life.

Dogs are increasingly being employed as stress-busters and confidence-boosters in offices and schools. I can understand why. For the past six years, two sleek black labradors have stayed with me for several weeks annually while their owners go on holiday. With Jethro and Kassie on board, life feels complete. Their joy is infectious. Rain or shine we walk the towpath – off the lead – and play ball. I never need to call them; they keep an eye on me and walk to heel when told. They are the perfect dogs. In the evenings, I join them on the floor to curl up in front of the fire. Sometimes we spoon and hold paws. I cried when they left after their first six-week holiday.

It has been a privilege to care for those adorable dogs. But the reality is that they also cared for me. They would greet me in the morning, Jethro’s big tail thwacking the carpet before he did his downward-dog yoga stretch. I would go back to bed with a cuppa and shortly afterwards one or other would come and rest their head on the bed and look at me with ‘let’s go for a walk’ eyes. I talked with them while we walked, often more words in a day than I would speak to fellow human beings. Other walkers were more inclined to stop and chat than when I walk alone. I do believe those bright-eyed hounds have kept me this side of sanity during some hard times.

My mother died in February, just ten weeks after being diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. I miss her very much. Jethro and Kassie brought joy to dark days. Jethro died in November. He was 15, a grand age for a labrador. I am so thankful to my friends who not only let me share their dog over the years but paid me for the privilege. I still yearn for a labrador of my own; one as waggy, shiny and well-behaved as Jethro or Kassie. But my angst about whether it is environmentally responsible to own a dog remains.

Having A Dog Of My Own Will Save The NHS Money

Maybe if a dog keeps me fit and healthy and reduces my cost to the National Health Service, thanks to an improvement in physical and mental wellbeing, a dog of my own is an acceptable extravagance? (If extravagance is the right word?) That is how I am justifiying it to myself anyway. I am seeking out a labrador in earnest now. I have been vetted by Labrador Retriever Rescue Southern England (labrador-rescue.org.uk): my narrowboat and I have been deemed suitable.

I keep checking the charity’s website and visiting the ‘Dogs Needing Homes’ page. I feel heartless being fussy but my expectations are high. I will forever judge a dog against my two holiday visitors. There was one, Tia, a lean and alert fox red labrador who tugged my heart strings but before I could pick up the dog-and-bone, she had gone. This is like Internet dating. Perhaps signing up to a dog sharing webiste such as borrowmydoggy.com would be a better option? I could have doggy dates, up and down the country – a dog in every port – with no commitment, none of the cost and less environmental impact.

If I lived in Greater London, Yorkshire or Hertfordshire, I could even foster a dog for Dogs Trust and have food and vet bills covered. (https://www.moretodogstrust.org.uk/about-freedom/about-freedom)

But for now, if a man on the towpath wanders up to you and asks to stroke your labrador, take pity on him, he can’t help it.

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