The plot thickens, as they say.

We all know the old story of blaming the innocent badger for the bovine TB epidemic in cattle.

We all know that this story ends badly for the badgers who, despite science repeatedly showing that they are not responsible for the epidemic, have been culled in England in their thousands.

And we all know it’s happening under a ludicrous, ill-thought out policy that this Government is blindly pushing through, despite the opposition of most people, most experts and most politicians.

bTB is a bacterial infectious disease of cattle that can infect other species, such as deer, goats, pigs, llamas, and yes, also badgers. But most people don’t know that cats and dogs can also get infected.

In fact, in 2011 a study was conducted in Ireland on the diseases of hunting hounds, and bTB was found in them. The study did not look into how the hounds got the disease as it only looked at post mortems, but they could have got it by either being fed infected cows or by being in fields where infected cattle had recently been.

Nobody paid that much attention to that Irish case until now, because an outbreak of bTB has been discovered in a hunt in the middle of the bTB epidemic zone in England.

The news Defra didn’t want you to read …

The Kimblewick Hunt covers a wide area which includes parts of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire. In bTB epidemic terms, the hunt territory is in the middle of what is called the ‘edge area’, between the ‘high-risk’ and the ‘low-risk’ areas. But if you check Defra’s online map that plots where the current outbreaks are, you can see several occurring within the hunt’s territory.

Several sources suggest that between 25 and 40 hounds from this pack have already been put down, and the hunt stopped going out several months ago.

But this is the interesting part of the story. Do you know how the press found out about it? Because they contacted the hunt and Defra and asked them. And why did they ask them? Because the League Against Cruel Sports told them to do so when a tip off from the anti-hunt organisation Hounds Off was received, after having discovered the whole thing by pure accident.

A small Hounds Off team recently monitored two meets of the Kimblewick Hunt, and in one of them they found something strange. The Kimblewick Hunt jacket is mustard coloured but the Huntsman on this day was wearing green. That made them ask questions, and eventually they learnt that other hunts had been using the Kimblewick hunt territory because the hounds were not allowed to go out (because of the disease).

This had been happening for months and there was no information out there warning anyone about this outbreak. Had the Hounds Off team not been monitoring the hunt, it is quite possible that nobody would have ever found out as the hunting season is about to finish.

Cease all hunting activity until we have the answers?

This is quite serious. Although hunting with hounds was banned by the Hunting Act 2004, hunts continue to go out, usually claiming to be ‘trail hunting’ (not to be confused with drag hunting) or hunting under one of the exemptions of the Act, although many believe, including me, these are false claims and most are hunting illegally.

I estimate that there are more than 3,000 hunting hounds in the bTB epidemic zone alone, which may be out in the countryside an average of two days a week during the six-month hunting season. This means many dogs moving from field to field. Dogs that can get infected, in fields where infected cattle may have been, possibly eating some of them from time to time.

Are there not questions to be asked? Should all hunting activity cease until we have the right answers?

There are indeed many questions that are yet to be answered. As hounds are regularly fed fallen stock, if this is the actual source of transmission it is possible that this is not an isolated case and there have been many that have either not been reported or covered up.

If there is no confirmation of how the hunts got infected, why did Defra not put out an order to stop potentially infected hounds running free in the countryside before they could find out? If so many hounds got infected, did they all get it from the same source (i.e. eating an infected carcass) or did they infect each other by sharing the same quarters?

The tip of a hidden bTB ‘iceberg’

If the hounds infected each other, could they have infected other packs when some of the hounds were taken to any of the hound shows that occur all over the country?

If the hounds got the disease from being in a field where infected cattle had been recently, would other packs of other types of hunts, likes beagles or harriers, that may share the same fields, also have been at risk of getting infected? Perhaps they did, but nobody reported it?

If other packs of hounds were invited as guests in the Kimblewick Hunt’s territory during the time the hounds were not allowed out, could those hounds have been infected in the same way the Kimblewick hounds were, and then take the disease to their own territory when they would return home? Could all this have been happening for years?

Is there a cover up? Could the fact that Lord Gardiner of Kimble, the current Defra Parliamentary Under-Secretary, is also the former deputy chief executive of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance and an honorary member of this particular hunt, explain this possible cover up?

Are the hunts more responsible for the Bovine Tb epidemic that we are led to believe?

Let’s ask these questions and uncover the truth!

Jordi Casamitjana is Head of Policy and Research art the League Against Cruel Sports.

Also on The Ecologist today: ‘Bovine TB found in foxhounds – and nothing to do with badgers! Now what?‘ by Lesley Docksey.

A few days ago I went for a walk, well before the dawn, in order to listen to the ‘dawn chorus’. It’s something I like to do a few times a year, especially in the early Spring when the birdsong is at its loudest.

I’ve been doing these walks since before my teens. Over that period there’s been one inescapable change in the countryside around my home town of Banbury – noise.

In many ways the modern urban-dweller has become immured to noise; we exclude it, and bar it from our thoughts – a process even more challenging since the advent of the personal stereo and the mobile phone. But we never truly escape it.

For those who like to enjoy the natural environment, noise is something to be escaped from within the relative sanctuary of the landscape. These days that’s getting harder and harder to accomplish.

That’s not only because of noise from all around – in particular from urban areas, roads and the increasing mechanisation of agriculture – but also due to the increasing level of air traffic overhead.

Bird song is good for you

Walking out before the dawn my objective was to reach Salt Way, which fringes the south-western quadrant of Banbury. It’s the old Roman salt route from Droitwich to Buckinghamshire, which has existed since long before the town itself, and which links to the more ancient prehistoric Portway and Welsh Road trackways.

Due to its age Salt Way has exceptionally dense, wide and species-rich ancient hedgerows which demarcate it from the surrounding fields.

Perfect for listening to birds. Except on that morning, as even before rush hour the easterly breeze was wafting the sound of the M40 motorway from over two and a half miles away, on the other side of town.

That got me musing on an interesting paper by Cox et al., ‘Doses of Neighborhood Nature‘, which I’d just read in the journal Bioscience.

In the study the researchers were able to demonstrate a positive correlation between the quality of people’s everyday experience of nature, and a lower prevalence of depression, anxiety, and stress. These results build upon a wealth of other similar studies which have appeared over the last few years – part of the growing fields of ecopsychology.

One of the principal metrics the study used to assess the ‘quality’ of a persons natural experience was the afternoon abundance of birds. While that doesn’t strictly correlate to where I am now, stood in the gloom of a pre-dawn byway, I think the comparison was valid – given the louder and intense levels of birdsong I was able experience.

Noise and nuisance

If ‘natural’ experiences are good for you, does the inverse effect hold true? – that urban noise is bad for you?

The damage of noise to society has been acknowledge in English law since Henry III introduced the concept of ‘public nuisance’, almost 800 years ago. Urban environments can also create negative health effects, especially in terms of stress and mental health.

Generally what many research studies find is that our recovery from the stresses of everyday life tends to be better, and takes place faster, when we are exposed to green landscaped spaces or less noisy natural environments. Difficulty is, that’s getting harder to do these days – the result of higher urbanization globally.

Banbury is a growing town. Immediately to the west of the section of Salt Way where I was sat, the construction of a few hundred houses was about to commence. Permission for another thousand was recently granted on the opposite side of the main A361 road. To the north another five hundred are being planned or built, and another 2,500 are being added to the southern edge of the town right now.

That doesn’t just mean that the species rich hedgerow along Salt Way will be severed from the countryside by urban development – perhaps reducing its diversity in future.

As each year passes, it takes longer to get to the outside of the town; and progressively harder to escape the ‘noise’ envelope of the town as its larger size generates higher volumes of traffic and thus noise.

But aren’t cars are getting quieter?

Road vehicles are not the only significant source of noise. Eg, for those of you who drink instant coffee, the occasional hiss of high pressure steam that radiates out across Banbury is created by your caffeine craving – as the leading brands are made here in Europe’s biggest coffee plant.

The common misapprehension about road noise is that it’s about motorized vehicles. In fact, unless the vehicle has a mechanical fault, a large part of the noise comes from the tyre’s contact with the road surface. Hence the use of many more electric vehicles would still give rise to significant road noise.

As a briefing from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology noted in 2009, while the noise emitted by cars has reduce by eleven decibels since 1970, there has been no associated reduction in the road noise generated. That’s because tyre noise is difficult to tackle, and also because traffic volumes have significantly increased, meaning there are more tyres making noise.

Here in Banbury we also have another problem – aircraft. It’s a lot less ‘acute’ than it was, since the USAF’s jet fighters left their local base in 1994. However the trans-Atlantic air corridors for south-east England and middle-Europe cross the skies above North Oxfordshire. At certain times of the day, particularly morning and evening, the ‘chronic’ level noise from above is almost constant.

The invasive nature of that noise was highlighted in 2010 when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted. I went for a walk and there was something glaringly different about the landscape. Then I realized: no aircraft noise – the result of the flight ban.

The effect was stunning, stirring, and unfortunately short-lived.

What we’re talking about here is lost ‘tranquility’

In 2010 the new coalition government conducted a ‘bonfire of the Quangos‘ – closing or merging many of the government’s advisory and expert bodies. For me one of the most significant was the abolition of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP).

Since 1970, RCEP had produced some of the UK government’s best, and most politically embarrassing academic studies on pollution and the environment – from nuclear waste to soil protection.

In 1994, RECP produced its ground-breaking 18th Report on Transport and the Environment. Against the background of the Government’s road building programme of that time, the contents were inflammatory – and increased the level of protests against new road construction.

In that report there were two maps which showed the level of ‘tranquility’ – the area of countryside unaffected by road, aircraft or urban noise – in the south-east of England. One map showed the ‘tranquil’ area in 1960, the other in 1992. Subtracting one map from the other you realize the level of ‘tranquil’ countryside which was lost over that 30-year period.

In their conclusions RCEP stated,

“Noise from vehicles and aircraft is a major source of stress and dissatisfaction, notably in towns but now intruding into many formerly tranquil areas. Construction of new roads and airports to accommodate traffic is destroying irreplaceable landscapes and features of our cultural heritage.”

The importance of ecopsychology to environmentalism

It would be easy to reduce this to an issue of car tyres, or the encroachment of urbanization. Instead what environmentalism has to grasp are the clear messages about human well-being which are emerging from ecopsychological research.

Climate change is abstract. Air pollution, except under extreme conditions, is abstract. Yet studies which examine the fundamental psychological human dependence upon the natural environment can tell us something which, for many, is directly appreciable.

Talking about wellbeing, or the the stress- and anxiety-reducing qualities of green space, might seem a distraction from the perilous ecological challenges of our time. That is a far too limited perspective:

• If we deal with road noise, by reducing the use of road vehicles, or reducing their speeds, we affect both air pollution and climate change.

• If we increase green spaces, and take greater care with how the urban fringe is managed, then we improve people’s ability to access nature and increase their well-being – and we also begin to address issues such as biodiversity loss and landscape fragmentation.

• More than anything, increasing people’s awareness of the natural environment would increase society’s valuation of it – and their propensity to change to protect it.

A few years ago I write a briefing on ecopsychology as part of a series on how lightweight camping/backpacking could be a means to address lifestyle sustainability – and allow people to adapt/develop the skills to live lower-impact lifestyles in their own homes as a result.

A focus on ecopsychology as part of local environment campaigns, especially for children, could be equally transformative – particularly as current economic and political trends are questioning the value of ‘big’ ecological issues such as climate change.

Small is, after all, beautiful?

That morning, walking to the top of Banbury’s local summit, Crouch Hill, the sun rose through a cloudy horizon. All around the noise level had been growing steadily as the rush hour approached and the roads filled with vehicles.

Moving beyond that requires more than a change of transport policy. What it requires is a realization that human interaction with nature is an absolute essential for well-being.

Far more than just changing your diet or going to the gym, contact with nature is a mechanism to find ourselves as ‘whole’ people; part of our environment, not shielded or walled away from it.

Walking out into a dark morning to sit in a hedge and listen to birds may seem a strange route to health, but the evidence is that it works.

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental researcher and freelance author. He is also the creator of the Free Range Activism Website, FRAW

A fully referenced version of this article is available on FRAW.

The plot thickens, as they say.

We all know the old story of blaming the innocent badger for the bovine TB epidemic in cattle.

We all know that this story ends badly for the badgers who, despite science repeatedly showing that they are not responsible for the epidemic, have been culled in England in their thousands.

And we all know it’s happening under a ludicrous, ill-thought out policy that this Government is blindly pushing through, despite the opposition of most people, most experts and most politicians.

bTB is a bacterial infectious disease of cattle that can infect other species, such as deer, goats, pigs, llamas, and yes, also badgers. But most people don’t know that cats and dogs can also get infected.

In fact, in 2011 a study was conducted in Ireland on the diseases of hunting hounds, and bTB was found in them. The study did not look into how the hounds got the disease as it only looked at post mortems, but they could have got it by either being fed infected cows or by being in fields where infected cattle had recently been.

Nobody paid that much attention to that Irish case until now, because an outbreak of bTB has been discovered in a hunt in the middle of the bTB epidemic zone in England.

The news Defra didn’t want you to read …

The Kimblewick Hunt covers a wide area which includes parts of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire. In bTB epidemic terms, the hunt territory is in the middle of what is called the ‘edge area’, between the ‘high-risk’ and the ‘low-risk’ areas. But if you check Defra’s online map that plots where the current outbreaks are, you can see several occurring within the hunt’s territory.

Several sources suggest that between 25 and 40 hounds from this pack have already been put down, and the hunt stopped going out several months ago.

But this is the interesting part of the story. Do you know how the press found out about it? Because they contacted the hunt and Defra and asked them. And why did they ask them? Because the League Against Cruel Sports told them to do so when a tip off from the anti-hunt organisation Hounds Off was received, after having discovered the whole thing by pure accident.

A small Hounds Off team recently monitored two meets of the Kimblewick Hunt, and in one of them they found something strange. The Kimblewick Hunt jacket is mustard coloured but the Huntsman on this day was wearing green. That made them ask questions, and eventually they learnt that other hunts had been using the Kimblewick hunt territory because the hounds were not allowed to go out (because of the disease).

This had been happening for months and there was no information out there warning anyone about this outbreak. Had the Hounds Off team not been monitoring the hunt, it is quite possible that nobody would have ever found out as the hunting season is about to finish.

Cease all hunting activity until we have the answers?

This is quite serious. Although hunting with hounds was banned by the Hunting Act 2004, hunts continue to go out, usually claiming to be ‘trail hunting’ (not to be confused with drag hunting) or hunting under one of the exemptions of the Act, although many believe, including me, these are false claims and most are hunting illegally.

I estimate that there are more than 3,000 hunting hounds in the bTB epidemic zone alone, which may be out in the countryside an average of two days a week during the six-month hunting season. This means many dogs moving from field to field. Dogs that can get infected, in fields where infected cattle may have been, possibly eating some of them from time to time.

Are there not questions to be asked? Should all hunting activity cease until we have the right answers?

There are indeed many questions that are yet to be answered. As hounds are regularly fed fallen stock, if this is the actual source of transmission it is possible that this is not an isolated case and there have been many that have either not been reported or covered up.

If there is no confirmation of how the hunts got infected, why did Defra not put out an order to stop potentially infected hounds running free in the countryside before they could find out? If so many hounds got infected, did they all get it from the same source (i.e. eating an infected carcass) or did they infect each other by sharing the same quarters?

The tip of a hidden bTB ‘iceberg’

If the hounds infected each other, could they have infected other packs when some of the hounds were taken to any of the hound shows that occur all over the country?

If the hounds got the disease from being in a field where infected cattle had been recently, would other packs of other types of hunts, likes beagles or harriers, that may share the same fields, also have been at risk of getting infected? Perhaps they did, but nobody reported it?

If other packs of hounds were invited as guests in the Kimblewick Hunt’s territory during the time the hounds were not allowed out, could those hounds have been infected in the same way the Kimblewick hounds were, and then take the disease to their own territory when they would return home? Could all this have been happening for years?

Is there a cover up? Could the fact that Lord Gardiner of Kimble, the current Defra Parliamentary Under-Secretary, is also the former deputy chief executive of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance and an honorary member of this particular hunt, explain this possible cover up?

Are the hunts more responsible for the Bovine Tb epidemic that we are led to believe?

Let’s ask these questions and uncover the truth!

Jordi Casamitjana is Head of Policy and Research art the League Against Cruel Sports.

Also on The Ecologist today: ‘Bovine TB found in foxhounds – and nothing to do with badgers! Now what?‘ by Lesley Docksey.

The plot thickens, as they say.

We all know the old story of blaming the innocent badger for the bovine TB epidemic in cattle.

We all know that this story ends badly for the badgers who, despite science repeatedly showing that they are not responsible for the epidemic, have been culled in England in their thousands.

And we all know it’s happening under a ludicrous, ill-thought out policy that this Government is blindly pushing through, despite the opposition of most people, most experts and most politicians.

bTB is a bacterial infectious disease of cattle that can infect other species, such as deer, goats, pigs, llamas, and yes, also badgers. But most people don’t know that cats and dogs can also get infected.

In fact, in 2011 a study was conducted in Ireland on the diseases of hunting hounds, and bTB was found in them. The study did not look into how the hounds got the disease as it only looked at post mortems, but they could have got it by either being fed infected cows or by being in fields where infected cattle had recently been.

Nobody paid that much attention to that Irish case until now, because an outbreak of bTB has been discovered in a hunt in the middle of the bTB epidemic zone in England.

The news Defra didn’t want you to read …

The Kimblewick Hunt covers a wide area which includes parts of Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Oxfordshire and Hampshire. In bTB epidemic terms, the hunt territory is in the middle of what is called the ‘edge area’, between the ‘high-risk’ and the ‘low-risk’ areas. But if you check Defra’s online map that plots where the current outbreaks are, you can see several occurring within the hunt’s territory.

Several sources suggest that between 25 and 40 hounds from this pack have already been put down, and the hunt stopped going out several months ago.

But this is the interesting part of the story. Do you know how the press found out about it? Because they contacted the hunt and Defra and asked them. And why did they ask them? Because the League Against Cruel Sports told them to do so when a tip off from the anti-hunt organisation Hounds Off was received, after having discovered the whole thing by pure accident.

A small Hounds Off team recently monitored two meets of the Kimblewick Hunt, and in one of them they found something strange. The Kimblewick Hunt jacket is mustard coloured but the Huntsman on this day was wearing green. That made them ask questions, and eventually they learnt that other hunts had been using the Kimblewick hunt territory because the hounds were not allowed to go out (because of the disease).

This had been happening for months and there was no information out there warning anyone about this outbreak. Had the Hounds Off team not been monitoring the hunt, it is quite possible that nobody would have ever found out as the hunting season is about to finish.

Cease all hunting activity until we have the answers?

This is quite serious. Although hunting with hounds was banned by the Hunting Act 2004, hunts continue to go out, usually claiming to be ‘trail hunting’ (not to be confused with drag hunting) or hunting under one of the exemptions of the Act, although many believe, including me, these are false claims and most are hunting illegally.

I estimate that there are more than 3,000 hunting hounds in the bTB epidemic zone alone, which may be out in the countryside an average of two days a week during the six-month hunting season. This means many dogs moving from field to field. Dogs that can get infected, in fields where infected cattle may have been, possibly eating some of them from time to time.

Are there not questions to be asked? Should all hunting activity cease until we have the right answers?

There are indeed many questions that are yet to be answered. As hounds are regularly fed fallen stock, if this is the actual source of transmission it is possible that this is not an isolated case and there have been many that have either not been reported or covered up.

If there is no confirmation of how the hunts got infected, why did Defra not put out an order to stop potentially infected hounds running free in the countryside before they could find out? If so many hounds got infected, did they all get it from the same source (i.e. eating an infected carcass) or did they infect each other by sharing the same quarters?

The tip of a hidden bTB ‘iceberg’

If the hounds infected each other, could they have infected other packs when some of the hounds were taken to any of the hound shows that occur all over the country?

If the hounds got the disease from being in a field where infected cattle had been recently, would other packs of other types of hunts, likes beagles or harriers, that may share the same fields, also have been at risk of getting infected? Perhaps they did, but nobody reported it?

If other packs of hounds were invited as guests in the Kimblewick Hunt’s territory during the time the hounds were not allowed out, could those hounds have been infected in the same way the Kimblewick hounds were, and then take the disease to their own territory when they would return home? Could all this have been happening for years?

Is there a cover up? Could the fact that Lord Gardiner of Kimble, the current Defra Parliamentary Under-Secretary, is also the former deputy chief executive of the pro-hunting Countryside Alliance and an honorary member of this particular hunt, explain this possible cover up?

Are the hunts more responsible for the Bovine Tb epidemic that we are led to believe?

Let’s ask these questions and uncover the truth!

Jordi Casamitjana is Head of Policy and Research art the League Against Cruel Sports.

Also on The Ecologist today: ‘Bovine TB found in foxhounds – and nothing to do with badgers! Now what?‘ by Lesley Docksey.

The news finally broke cover a few days ago, news which the Kimblewick Hunt had been sitting on since December.

The Kimblewick is an amalgamation of three former hunts, and hunts over land in six counties, Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire.

Rather than the familiar red coats, it wears coats of a peculiar mustard yellow. None of this has made it newsworthy.

But the fact that 25 of its foxhounds had to be put down because they were infected with bovine TB, with a further 120 undergoing testing, has made both wildlife organisations and farmers sit up. Information given to Hounds Off claimed that at least 40 hounds had been culled.

Horse & Hound were full of praise of the Hunt’s action in suspending hunting, only to add that hunting was carrying on anyway, using ‘visiting packs’. And of course the Hunt was cooperating fully with Defra, vets and everyone else to find the source of the problem.

H&H added, for readers’ comfort, that the hounds had been ‘humanely put down’. The Huffington Post used the word ‘euthanised’. Sorry, folks. That means they were shot, as per usual, by the kennelman or huntsman.

The same problem could be lurking in hunts across the British Isles.

The League Against Cruel Sports, which gives an account of just how the bTB outbreak was made public through the work of Hounds Off, is demanding that all hunting should stop until the problem has been fully investigated.

Defra says that bTB in dogs is not a notifiable disease, but an outbreak of this size in dogs that work across farmland must surely now be taken seriously. Just how many other packs are infected?

And of course hound-to-cattle bTB transmission, perhaps via hound excrement left in fields pastured by cattle, is entirely plausible – a fact that concerned farmers are waking up to. Hound excrement may even be infecting badgers with bTB.

Some farmers, belatedly trying to protect their cattle, have banned hunts from their land. Those local to the hunt kennels are refusing to let the hunt exercise the hounds on their land.

And campaigners fighting to stop the badger culls are wondering how the government’s failure to deal with TB in the cattle through stricter cattle-based measures will spread the problem even more. Some of course also wonder if the foxhound debacle will also be blamed on the badger.

So we must ask: why should such a major outbreak of bTB occur in foxhounds?

The hounds fed TB-infected ‘fallen cattle’ meat

The answer is simple. The hounds have been fed raw, TB-infected meat. Although this would be a contravention of meat hygiene rules and bTB controls, rules have never bothered either the hunts or farmers.

For years hunts have removed ‘fallen cattle’ from farms, a favour that works both ways – hunts get meat to feed their hounds and farmers get rid of unwanted carcasses. During the 2001-02 foot and mouth epidemic, the government broke its own rules by paying hunts to slaughter cattle and remove the carcasses because their own staff could not cope.

The fact that such cattle fed to hounds may have ‘fallen’ due to disease will be is ignored. Or perhaps not. It would make sense to many farmers that, if they suspect one of their beasts is infected with bTB, they should get it slaughtered and removed before it is tested positive and Defra puts the farm under restrictions.

You would think the farmer would rather have a disease-free herd. But more than one has been prosecuted for swapping ear tags (an individual identification tag that all cattle must have), allowing a poor but disease-free cow go to slaughter rather than the good milker which also happens to have bTB.

It should not come as a surprise that the hounds are open to this disease. A 2010 Republic of Ireland study into the diseases of hounds and the reasons why they are culled, found bTB in some of the hounds they autopsied, along with a lot of other painful conditions. Being a foxhound is not a comfortable life.

Will Defra take real action?

Two or three years ago the Northern Ireland hunt saboteurs managed to film the kennelman of the North Downs Hunt butchering cattle carcasses that had come from local farms. Government officials apparently issued a warning at the time, and the sabs thought that there had been previous warnings, due to the risk of spreading bTB.

If NI government officials recognise the risk, why are they not cracking down on it? And will Defra follow suit?

While packs of hounds exist, whether they are being used illegally by fox hunts or legally by drag hunts, the hunts will seek supplies of free meat for their hounds. And sadly, pro-hunt farmers will go on offering it, regardless of what disease they might be passing on.

Lesley Docksey is a freelance writer who writes for The Ecologist and other media on the badger cull and other environmental topics; and on political issues for UK and international websites.

Also on The Ecologist today: ‘Official cover-up – are hunting hounds the ‘cryptic carrier’ for bovine TB?‘ by Jordi Casamitjana / League Against Cruel Sports.

Will you join the badger patrols this year? Why not contact your local badger group and find out if they run training days. Many badger patrol groups have their own pages on Facebook.

Why a project to find common meaning in our common struggle to prevent climate-catastrophe deserves the name ‘Apollo-Earth’

There is a mission brewing and building, a mission that needs all hands that are ready: To bring the ‘un-named movement’ – the ‘for-life’ story of our time – to a tipping point.

This needs to happen faster than the rate at which our planet is approaching fatal climatic tipping points (fatal, that is, to us – always remember that it isn’t strictly speaking ‘the planet’ that needs saving, only the animals, including ourselves, who live on it). The climate nemesis we face is now quite predictable: it is a ‘white’ swan event: But it could still be forestalled, with determination. If that forestalling is to be successfully accomplished, if together we are to choose to save ourselves and our descendants, then we need to see a radical shift in humanity’s collective response to the rapidly growing threat of breakdown of our environmental life-support systems.

This will only happen if the forces of negativity, idiocy and oppression are outweighed by the force for rebellion, for sanity and for good in the epic struggle which will define our century.

A Planet Under Siege

The first macro-force is our dominant ‘shadow’-culture of control and domination. Historically this

force could be defined simply within the model of oligarchs and serfs. Today, if anything, it’s become even more polarised, yet paradoxically more shrouded; a very tiny elite group on one side and the rest of human society and the natural world – in danger of becoming their chattels – on the other.

The levers of power in at least most First World countries, both in the financial system and at the level of state, have been largely taken over by a handful of corporate and private interests. Tragically, their individual and collective impact exacts an immense negative toll, unraveling the hard-won democracy of citizens, whilst ‘mining’ the natural world to the point where breakdown of our basic life support systems has now become likely.

The forces of neo-liberal economics, ‘market’-fetishism and elite state control work so strongly against human and broader biotic wellbeing that they may put the biosphere itself at risk. Apparent improvements, especially in recent times nearly always turn out to be ‘smoke-and-mirrors’. Biomass is a classic example; promoted as a ‘renewable’ energy source, it relies on the destruction of natural ecosystems for plantation monocultures, increasing carbon emissions and decimating biodiversity (See www.biofuelwatch.org.uk). Meanwhile, the global reach of the ‘monoculture’ of reckless profit-seeking and rent-seeking has been achieved by enlisting the unconscious support of the populace through advertising – ‘the consumer society’ and mass media (including celebrity-‘culture’, and most ‘social media’). Our lifestyles ensure that we aid and abet destruction, without ever consciously choosing it for ourselves.

If our natural survival response was functioning well, we’d be fighting the planetary danger or fleeing the enslavement traps set for us. Instead we are frozen, unable to respond to the conflicting truths – the erosion of that which is dear to us and the part each of us plays in contributing to this, simply by going about our lives.

Thus we end up, even the most aware and active of us, in a kind of tacit denial. This is strikingly manifested in the abundantly widespread climate-denial in which to some degree virtually all of us participate; (see Climate Change is a white swan).

By consuming consumerism and all its trappings – albeit frequently laced with greenwash – civil society gets caught in the crossfire between our inner knowing and the silver-tongued palliatives of our so-called leaders.

But perhaps, just perhaps, our shared inner knowing is stronger…

Awakening: The ‘un-named movement’

For: the second macro-force is a fast-building sub-culture termed by Paul Hawken the ‘unnamed

movement’. In Hawken’s book The Blessed Unrest he describes the tens if not hundreds of thousands of environmental and social justice groups, involving hundreds of millions of people, emerging worldwide at a grassroots level. Collectively they represent a planet-wide web of interconnection and awakening. Interestingly this ‘web’ found metaphorical expression in the culminatory portion of the film Avatar, which, encouragingly and not coincidentally, was, judging by box-office receipts, the most popular film ever made: Avatar Transformed Cinema.

This movement is expressed in all sorts of life-affirming interventions such as widespread activism, grassroots solidarity, myriad labours of care and love, and much more, which ultimately deliver social wellbeing, local resilience (Local Cultures) and environmental safeguards. The unnamed movement is deeply ‘for-life’. (For more on the meaning of this being ‘for-life’, see the close of Read’s book Philosophy for Life as reviewed here.

This movement is a deeper expression of who we really are when concern for or debasement of that which we hold dear finally causes us to think and act for ourselves. It is empathetic, altruistic, holistic and pulses with the spiritual force that binds us: interconnection – or what Charles Eisenstein (following the Buddha and Thich Nhat Hanh) calls interbeing. It remains to be (fully) seen but it could represent the greatest awakening yet in human consciousness. The true opening of our eyes, hearts and souls, that we now deeply desire, know is possible, and know is necessary.

The ultimate struggle

So these are two primary macro-forces shaping the ‘Anthropocene’ and what may follow. It’s a race between the growing movement for positive change and that of ecological unraveling. Both of these forces are active, but only one will ultimately dominate. Our discussion, our proposal is about ensuring that the ‘for-life’ path has the chance to succeed.

Several macro-levers are at play: democracy, economics, energy, ecology, food & water availability and more. Each is approaching such an extreme level of fragility that the modern ‘civilised’ world we know could be brought to an end quite abruptly. But like any fragility or indeed potential breakdown, there lies opportunity, both in itself and in its wake.

Our job – yours too, reader – is to elucidate and then help to convey with viral speed a deep understanding of the routes which allow a strengthening of a ‘for-life’ agenda in each case. Achieving this is also to make the malfunctioning of most of the system – inherent in our dominant economics and politics – so visible that it cannot continue.

Crucial to the possibility of success in this endeavour, this achievement is the recognition that the greatest potential force for good on the planet is the seven billion human population, or at least most of ‘the 99%’, turned in near-unison toward a radical challenge against the ‘anti-life’ force operating in our hijacked governance systems. Seven billion people focused on protective and restorative activity can rapidly bring about major and lasting change on the planet.

Restoration: What A ‘For-Life’ Movement Looks Like

What kind of activity do we mean? This is not the place to detail that. But we will mention five key elements of it, elements so pressing, so huge – and yet so little discussed in the ‘mainstream’ – that they can strike one as new, even though they represent the well-trodden paths of both humanity’s long history of resistance struggles and the ancient wisdom of indigenous cultures (Ancient Futures & Post Growth Localisation):

First, and above all, a necessary condition for all the rest, we need to make our voices heard, and make them count. The Occupy Movement, which involved hundreds of thousands in over 500 cities globally, was a valiant start. It directly challenged the neo-liberal economic agenda and its anti-life machinations. But it didn’t last; and in any case we need to go much further. Awakening is not just about seeing what’s going on, it’s about getting our voices heard, and getting a difference made by those voices (Noam Chomsky Interview).

>> Speaking up needs to include the voice of our natural world. Protecting our environmental life support systems requires two things; Protection and restoration. Only a massive movement demanding change will stop the destruction and initiate extensive restoration. Rewilding and non-monocultural re-greening can take us swiftly in the opposite direction from the commodifying and denuding of our natural systems, sparking the regrowth of great biodiverse areas.

>> We need to call out the damage wrought by industrial agriculture and forestry, demanding nothing less than a shift toward permaculture, agroforestry, organic and (above all) agroecological methods. These will be more labour-intensive but that can be a good thing, in a time when the constant refrain is worry about where the jobs of the future are to come from.

>> And modern building methods extract their own toll on the natural world.  We need to see a massive change in building methods, significantly less building (see Make Do & Mend) – and the employment of low impact materials, including recycled waste, wood and materials such as straw and hemp which both lock in carbon and offer insulation benefits. Growing such materials in biodiverse habitats makes this ecologically viable.

>> And then there’s that perennial call voiced now for 60 years or so; to stop burning fossil fuels. The only way we can achieve a ‘carbon descent’ is by implementing an ‘energy descent’ in the short term. This is because a complete shift to renewables is – even by optimistic projections – at least a decade-long process, and we are already on the cusp of irreversible climate feedbacks (tipping points). i.e. any wriggle room that we had at the launch of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 has now been squandered. So what would such an energy descent look like? It means foregoing virtually all non-essential fossil fuel burning. By introducing some form of per capita carbon allocation (e.g. carbon rationing (How We Can Save The Planet) or tradable quotas). An individual ‘ration’ would allow for the low mileage running a small, shared car, or one long haul flight perhaps every decade. A serious energy descent pathway would also require our governments to return investment to true renewables such as solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy.

Add these five interventions together as a starting point and we’re talking about an end to neo-liberal economics i.e. the global growth economy as we know it.  We’d be exchanging debt and asset bubbles (and the ensuing mayhem they portend) for a strategically planned economic descent, which sees the most destructive human activities phased out or replaced by benign technology.

We can make these changes – and fast

These five points should be at the heart of a plan that, for reasons we will now explain, we suggest might be called ‘Apollo Earth’. Taken together, they offer the outline of a very different way forward for humanity than business-as-usual or any of the usual techno-fixing variants of it. One such techno-fix – geo-engineering, aka ‘climate-engineering’ (Climate Geoengineering) – is so dangerously misguided that it threatens to further disrupt rather than remedy our finely tuned climate system. The Precautionary Principle demands that, as sketched above, we find a climate-safe alternative to geo-engineering (Safe Alternative to Geoengineering): Apollo Earth is therefore also a call to bring so called ‘experts’ to account, and to resist what will be their increasing siren calls in the coming years to risk everything on a climate-engineering gamble.

The exciting thing about our outline agenda here is that each point (and much more) is already strongly represented by environmental and civil society groups across the world. But we’re not yet at the critical threshold for change. Short of revolution (!), scaling-up requires traction at the political level, and this requires an unparalleled collective demand. With this, meaningful change would be underway in just one year (because most of the interventions we mention above are tied to the growing cycle, to annual climatic rhythms), and human society could potentially be making a net restorative contribution within a decade.

Across the world NGOs, grassroots activists, families and communities serve as torch-bearers. By challenging the status quo, (and) by planting woods, changing how we farm, building differently, installing solar paneling and much else they beckon us towards collective responsibility.

Time is of course of the essence: not just because of the pressing nature of the dire climate threat (cf. e.g. Avoiding Climate Change), but also because of recent political developments. Brexit and Trump, though likely to lead on balance to disastrous, calamitous moves in the wrong direction, make clear at least that people are awake enough to no longer support the establishment.

Globalisation is at last up for question; neo-liberalism and technocracy are at last on the ropes. But the prognoses for what happens next being ‘progressive’ and green are not great. Unless we think-and-act together, the next stage of the curtailing civil rights is probably not far down the road: we have to seize this moment to come together to struggle for a better future. In fact: For a future at all. 

Apollo Earth

We tentatively suggest calling this call to arms – a call to save the humans – ‘Apollo Earth’. Why? For these three related reasons:

1) Apollo is the Ancient Greek God of rationality. If we proceed onward down the path to self-imposed climate-nemesis, we will have disproved Aristotle’s famous definition of humankind as the rational animal. By coming together behind and successfully executing an Apollo-Earth project, we will have kept hope, wonderfully, alive, that perhaps we are a rational species of animal after all.

2) We need a unifying project to pull us together, at this time more than ever. As the U.S. was broadly unified behind the (first) Apollo project, so the world now needs to be broadly unified behind the project of saving ourselves and our beautiful living home. The unificatory project will require great effort, unprecedented ambition: as the mission to put ‘man’ on the Moon did. Compare this promising precedent, seeking to use the Apollo precedent to name the ambition for humanity of working together to meet the climate crisis by a transformative common effort: The need for an Apollo Programme to tackle climate change. And contrast this mirror-image, the disastrous possibility that the epochally-inappropriate President Trump might replace funding to rein in dangerous climate change with funding for a new Mars mission! Trump’s Mars Mission

3)  The Apollo missions led to the hugely-important and symbolic ‘overview effect’: ‘Overview Effect’. Astronauts went to space to discover the Moon – and discovered Earth. This incredible jewel, changed by life, with its so-thin and vulnerable carapace of atmosphere. The ‘overview effect’, available initially to astronauts, became available to us all vicariously by way of the important photos they brought back and also for instance via the means of the magnificent ecological work of art that was Hollywood’s ‘Gravity’ (see Gravity Blog), offers real hope. By going to space, we found our planetary home and the deep necessity of saving it. And, perhaps, the passion to save it, too. This point – what ‘the overview effect’ taught – was brought home further by the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission (a factive precedent of course for the fiction of Cuaron’s masterpiece, ‘Gravity’). The triumph of Apollo 13 was of course not the reaching of another world; it was the safe return, against incredible odds, to this world. The only place where we can live. And returning with enhanced recognition of its uniqueness and preciousness.

‘Spaceship Earth’

‘Apollo Earth’ is the clear recognition that we are already in a state of extreme emergency – akin to Apollo 13’s onboard systems failure, half a million miles from earth. Our mission – to steer a path away from mass extinction (to radically change course) – is heroic on a scale humanity has never faced before…  In short the ‘unnamed movement’ needs to evoke – to birth – something radically different if we are to have any chance of pulling back from the brink.  We are inescapably together on ‘Spaceship Earth’ (Buckminster Fuller’s term); there is no-one to ride to our rescue. Only us, and the void.

This is the biggest ask humanity has ever faced. No exaggeration. In our favour, history is replete with examples of humankind rising to meet extreme demands.  Extraordinary levels of creativity, leadership, innovation and social cohesion are unlocked at such times. 

The analogy we’d like to leave you with is that of the perfectly synchronous flight behavior known as murmuration associated with some bird flocks, most notably starlings and migrating geese. When in flight these birds respond to signals from the flock in a tiny fraction of a second and with near-perfect accuracy. In times of crisis and elation, human communities do something similar.  Human emotional signals are infectious and aligning.

Let’s hear the alarm that our climate system is sounding, loud and clear. Let’s prove that we are rational beings (as Aristotle, possibly the greatest philosopher of Ancient Greece, famously claimed). Rationality today doesn’t mean exploring options for colonizing another planet, it means an unprecedented journey into our own survival on planet Earth: Apollo-Earth.

And now over to you. Humanity needs to do something with precedents, but unprecedented, and at scale. How, together, can we midwife this into being? How can we act in time?

How can ‘Apollo-Earth’ be realized?

_______________________________

These Authors

Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, Chair of www.greenhousethinktank.org and a former Green Party Councillor and MP-candidate.

Deepak Rughani is a change-management consultant, has worked on climate issues since 2005 and is a co-director of Biofuelwatch, a UK and US-based NGO working to stop ecosystem destruction for bioenergy. 

You can contact them here: rupertread@fastmail.co.uk

“We dedicate this article to the late Heidi Hillman, without whom the great body of work produced by her beloved husband Mayer Hillman – one of few writers prescient enough to sound the climate alarm in the 1980s – would not have been possible.”

“We also note that the project we propose takes inspiration from David Wasdell’s critically important ‘Apollo Gaia’ project: Wasdell has shown perhaps more honestly and starkly than anyone (possible rivals for the crown include Kevin Anderson and James Hansen) the stakes and the folly of the path we are currently on. Apollo-Earth needs to be a far more ‘secular’ and popular continuation of Wasdell’s groundbreaking effort.”

This article is a sequel to Climate Change is a white swan event

These voices highlight both the size of the struggle for gender justice and of dismantling of patriarchy, and the close connection between this struggle and our fight for environmental justice. At the same time these voices give us hope and a direction for our fight.

We hope they will inspire you too…

“One of the biggest challenges is the assumed distance between environmental and gender justice campaigning: the two are so closely intertwined, but aren’t always seen to be. I’ve encountered the idea that the environment is the number one issue, and we can get to issues like trans rights, black lives or disability action once we’ve finished our work on climate change. That doesn’t make any sense. To me, environmental activism is gender and social justice activism.” – Emma, Young Friends of the Earth Europe

  “Working together in solidarity, the women environmentalists in my country and the region face the double challenge of defending their territories and defending themselves against patriarchy. This is two sides of the same coin: the destruction of the environment and the attack against women, that becomes more vicious the more we defend ourselves.” – Natalia, Friends of the Earth Argentina

“It has been identified that female environmental activists are facing an increase in systemic and structural oppressions brought about by capitalism. Even within the environmental movement, we need stronger political analysis and solutions to ensure women of colour and transwomen are represented. We are still fighting for our right to a society where all forms of discrimination and violence against women have been banished.” – Shenna, Friends of the Earth Europe

  “The capitalist and patriarchal system reinforces land grabbing, forests degradation as well as water and air pollution. Women in particular have limited access to these resources, leading to their subjugation and that of nature. Investors think it’s only men who are supposed to bargain on compensation issues and yet, when men get the money, they run away leaving women and children stranded.” – Peruth, Nape, Friends of the Earth Uganda

“One of the most significant challenges is the struggle against the sexual division of work that imposes the responsibility of care and reproduction work on women, while at the same time devaluing and concealing their productive work within the economy. We also need to fight the separation of the domestic and public spheres, through which the economic and political importance of the domestic sphere – to which women are relegated – is denied.” – Karin Nansen, REDES, Friends of the Earth Uruguay & the new Friends of the Earth International Chair

“Although the Philippines is considered to be one of the countries that has (comparatively) empowered women leaders and activists, our macho President’s pronouncements have set the gender justice fight back 20 years. We now have an environment that disempowers women and reduces activists to sexual objects. This makes our work all the more challenging, especially since the Philippines is still plagued by sex trafficking, prostitution, domestic violence, rape, incest and sexual abuse.” – Norly, LRC/Friends of the Earth Philippines

“Social movements suffer from State persecutions and threats. And women activists also suffer the consequences of power struggles within these movements. Their work is kept invisible and they have difficulty retaining their leadership due to harassment, disrespect, and lack of trust.” – Patricia, Friends of the Earth Brazil

“In social organisations problems include the lack of funding for gender justice campaigns or campaigns led by women in the organisation and the rigid adherence to the age-old practice whereby a male must always be head of a team/unit/family/group that is reproduced in work places. There is inadequate representation, participation and involvement of women.” – Rita, ERA/Friends of the Earth Nigeria

“Support for women is scarce, especially for mothers, making it difficult for them to return to work. We work with mothers in Fukushima protecting their children and avoiding radiation exposure as best they can. However the patriarchal structure of the family restricts their decisions. This kind of patriarchy is so deeply rooted in our culture, many people regard it as a sacrosanct tradition in Japanese culture.” – Ayumi, Friends of the Earth Japan

Messages of hope to all women

Yet despite these challenges, women activists are collectively building solidarity and spaces where they come together to fight for their rights. On International Women’s Day, women and transgender activists – who are on the frontline of the struggle for environmental and gender justice – have the following powerful messages of hope.

“Women have long been rising against violations, but perhaps now that we are more connected virtually and sentimentally we can amplify our cry of ‘enough’. We demand recognition, appreciation and respect. As part of a network of international reach, I feel that Friends of the Earth Brazil and I can connect with these struggles worldwide, and highlight the struggles of women in the territories in which we operate, creating a web of fighters, united by the agenda of gender justice.” – Patricia, Brazil

“I feel motivated, energised and united by the struggles of women across the world in their genuine efforts to dismantle patriarchal systems and authorities, particularly those that undermine and demean the rights of women especially environmental justice activists.”
 -
Rita, Nigeria

“We’re here, we’re queer and we’re part of your activism. Don’t assume that transgender people need special motivation to care about the environment. Recognise us, consider the spaces our bodies are safe or unsafe in, and put the time in to educate yourselves.”
 – Emma, Young Friends of the Earth Europe

“I feel so privileged to be one of the advocates of the rights of women and working in an organization that puts gender high on the agenda. In Uganda, we have initiated a movement that is led by women for women that promotes food sovereignty, fights the harm caused by the fossil fuel industry, energy production, climate change and land injustice, poor natural resources governance and patriarchy. Around 2000 women are already part of this movement.”
 – Peruth, Uganda

“Connecting to the women’s struggle around the world means, for me, challenging our ‘common sense’ – the lack of awareness that rights and opportunities are taken or lost – and helps us realise that there are things that we need and that we deserve.”
 – 
Ayumi, Japan

“We understand that the environment cannot be separated from justice, and justice is not justice if there is no justice for women. I feel connected to women’s struggles in a visceral, invisible, strong and undeniable way. This connection that we all have is what allows us to move forward and remain standing. The international feminist movement motivates us to continue to struggle for a sustainable world in which many worlds belong.” – Natalia, Argentina

“The fight of all women against the capitalist and patriarchal system is also our struggle. That’s why alliances are so fundamental with working class, indigenous, quilombola [community of descendants of black slaves] and peasant women who defend and construct other ways of being in their territories and who produce all that is necessary for human life. We are united by the struggle against the commodification of life, our bodies and our territory.”
 
- Karin Nansen, Uruguay, the new Friends of the Earth International Chair

“Being part of the Friends of the Earth International family has enabled me to feel connected with women’s struggles around the world… The realization that even in the small recesses of our world, there are women fighting for their rights, lives, livelihood and families gives me strength to do more.”
 – Norly, Philippines

“Historically, many female-led movements have fought and won vast rights for generations of women. My ancestral women elders fought colonial and imperial powers to protect communities and nature. Their legacy and those of all women who were part of various liberation movements continue. I feel connected to all women as part of a strong power base of worldwide resistance. We are nature and people protectors!”
 – Shenna, Friends of the Earth Europe

For the indigenous people who live in the Bolivian Amazon, life is hard. People are increasingly suffering from the effects of climate change, both forest fires caused by prolonged dry seasons and flooding due to more intense rainfall.  The flooding has the knock-on effect of causing malnutrition and disease because forest communities rely on firewood. When there is no dry wood, cooking food or boiling safe drinking water becomes extremely difficult and gas is often too expensive to get hold of.

The dependency on firewood not only reduces the unique biodiversity of the Amazon, collecting it and cooking with it is a time consuming and back breaking task which mainly falls on women. Deforestation also means these women must walk further and further to find the fuel they need to feed their families. It is estimated that women spend four hours a day cooking on wood and an hour collecting it.  

But now the versatility of renewable technology and the natural energy provided by the sun is starting to change all this.  Through its local partner organisations in the region, UK charity Christian Aid has started to give solar ovens to women. These orange boxes, powered by solar panels to capture sunlight, have already proven effective on the high plains of Bolivia where radiation is strong. But they have now been shown to also work further down, in the lower, more forested valleys, and even during the rainy season.  

At first it was unclear if families would adjust to the new contraptions having spent years cooking food in traditional ways on wood fires. But after plenty of practice and training women have become masters of what they now call ‘solar cooking’. They prepare the food in the morning, place it in the oven in a sunny spot and then let the power of the sun and human-made technology do the rest. It’s remarkable to see the oven lids opened after a few hours as clouds of steam emerge and pots full of delicious food are lifted out.

The 3 kilograms of firewood each family used to use for every meal is obviously a great saving for the forest, reducing deforestation and protecting the Amazonian ‘lungs of the earth’. For the women of the often-patriarchal communities the solar ovens have also had a transformative impact on their social and political lives too.

Doña Natividad Matareco, from the Bermejo region of Bolivia, said the saved time had allowed her and other women to become more politically empowered. “The Women Organisation in the community has meetings on Sundays in the afternoon,” she said. “We discuss important issues about the community. Before I could not attend the meetings because I thought ‘I cannot go, I have to cook. If my husband comes back and the food is not ready he will be upset’. But now I can attend the meetings. For me this is a big change. Now I can be in a meeting all day, discussing important community issues. As women, we need to decide ourselves that we have the right to participate, to organise ourselves, to look after ourselves.”

This newfound ‘spare time’ has also helped women’s economic empowerment too. In another community, Doña Esther Guarayuco, now is able to run a small shop. She explained: “I now have more free time which I use to clean my house, or to sew things with my sewing machine. I also have my small grocery store: I can do one thing and still sell.”

In the era of Donald Trump – whose behaviour towards women and threats to action on climate change are well known – it’s easy to feel despondent. But it’s worth remembering that in the jungles of the Amazon, away from the news headlines, environmental protection and gender justice is on the march.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor to the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe

These voices highlight both the size of the struggle for gender justice and of dismantling of patriarchy, and the close connection between this struggle and our fight for environmental justice. At the same time these voices give us hope and a direction for our fight.

We hope they will inspire you too…

“One of the biggest challenges is the assumed distance between environmental and gender justice campaigning: the two are so closely intertwined, but aren’t always seen to be. I’ve encountered the idea that the environment is the number one issue, and we can get to issues like trans rights, black lives or disability action once we’ve finished our work on climate change. That doesn’t make any sense. To me, environmental activism is gender and social justice activism.” – Emma, Young Friends of the Earth Europe

  “Working together in solidarity, the women environmentalists in my country and the region face the double challenge of defending their territories and defending themselves against patriarchy. This is two sides of the same coin: the destruction of the environment and the attack against women, that becomes more vicious the more we defend ourselves.” – Natalia, Friends of the Earth Argentina

“It has been identified that female environmental activists are facing an increase in systemic and structural oppressions brought about by capitalism. Even within the environmental movement, we need stronger political analysis and solutions to ensure women of colour and transwomen are represented. We are still fighting for our right to a society where all forms of discrimination and violence against women have been banished.” – Shenna, Friends of the Earth Europe

  “The capitalist and patriarchal system reinforces land grabbing, forests degradation as well as water and air pollution. Women in particular have limited access to these resources, leading to their subjugation and that of nature. Investors think it’s only men who are supposed to bargain on compensation issues and yet, when men get the money, they run away leaving women and children stranded.” – Peruth, Nape, Friends of the Earth Uganda

“One of the most significant challenges is the struggle against the sexual division of work that imposes the responsibility of care and reproduction work on women, while at the same time devaluing and concealing their productive work within the economy. We also need to fight the separation of the domestic and public spheres, through which the economic and political importance of the domestic sphere – to which women are relegated – is denied.” – Karin Nansen, REDES, Friends of the Earth Uruguay & the new Friends of the Earth International Chair

“Although the Philippines is considered to be one of the countries that has (comparatively) empowered women leaders and activists, our macho President’s pronouncements have set the gender justice fight back 20 years. We now have an environment that disempowers women and reduces activists to sexual objects. This makes our work all the more challenging, especially since the Philippines is still plagued by sex trafficking, prostitution, domestic violence, rape, incest and sexual abuse.” – Norly, LRC/Friends of the Earth Philippines

“Social movements suffer from State persecutions and threats. And women activists also suffer the consequences of power struggles within these movements. Their work is kept invisible and they have difficulty retaining their leadership due to harassment, disrespect, and lack of trust.” – Patricia, Friends of the Earth Brazil

“In social organisations problems include the lack of funding for gender justice campaigns or campaigns led by women in the organisation and the rigid adherence to the age-old practice whereby a male must always be head of a team/unit/family/group that is reproduced in work places. There is inadequate representation, participation and involvement of women.” – Rita, ERA/Friends of the Earth Nigeria

“Support for women is scarce, especially for mothers, making it difficult for them to return to work. We work with mothers in Fukushima protecting their children and avoiding radiation exposure as best they can. However the patriarchal structure of the family restricts their decisions. This kind of patriarchy is so deeply rooted in our culture, many people regard it as a sacrosanct tradition in Japanese culture.” – Ayumi, Friends of the Earth Japan

Messages of hope to all women

Yet despite these challenges, women activists are collectively building solidarity and spaces where they come together to fight for their rights. On International Women’s Day, women and transgender activists – who are on the frontline of the struggle for environmental and gender justice – have the following powerful messages of hope.

“Women have long been rising against violations, but perhaps now that we are more connected virtually and sentimentally we can amplify our cry of ‘enough’. We demand recognition, appreciation and respect. As part of a network of international reach, I feel that Friends of the Earth Brazil and I can connect with these struggles worldwide, and highlight the struggles of women in the territories in which we operate, creating a web of fighters, united by the agenda of gender justice.” – Patricia, Brazil

“I feel motivated, energised and united by the struggles of women across the world in their genuine efforts to dismantle patriarchal systems and authorities, particularly those that undermine and demean the rights of women especially environmental justice activists.”
 -
Rita, Nigeria

“We’re here, we’re queer and we’re part of your activism. Don’t assume that transgender people need special motivation to care about the environment. Recognise us, consider the spaces our bodies are safe or unsafe in, and put the time in to educate yourselves.”
 – Emma, Young Friends of the Earth Europe

“I feel so privileged to be one of the advocates of the rights of women and working in an organization that puts gender high on the agenda. In Uganda, we have initiated a movement that is led by women for women that promotes food sovereignty, fights the harm caused by the fossil fuel industry, energy production, climate change and land injustice, poor natural resources governance and patriarchy. Around 2000 women are already part of this movement.”
 – Peruth, Uganda

“Connecting to the women’s struggle around the world means, for me, challenging our ‘common sense’ – the lack of awareness that rights and opportunities are taken or lost – and helps us realise that there are things that we need and that we deserve.”
 – 
Ayumi, Japan

“We understand that the environment cannot be separated from justice, and justice is not justice if there is no justice for women. I feel connected to women’s struggles in a visceral, invisible, strong and undeniable way. This connection that we all have is what allows us to move forward and remain standing. The international feminist movement motivates us to continue to struggle for a sustainable world in which many worlds belong.” – Natalia, Argentina

“The fight of all women against the capitalist and patriarchal system is also our struggle. That’s why alliances are so fundamental with working class, indigenous, quilombola [community of descendants of black slaves] and peasant women who defend and construct other ways of being in their territories and who produce all that is necessary for human life. We are united by the struggle against the commodification of life, our bodies and our territory.”
 
- Karin Nansen, Uruguay, the new Friends of the Earth International Chair

“Being part of the Friends of the Earth International family has enabled me to feel connected with women’s struggles around the world… The realization that even in the small recesses of our world, there are women fighting for their rights, lives, livelihood and families gives me strength to do more.”
 – Norly, Philippines

“Historically, many female-led movements have fought and won vast rights for generations of women. My ancestral women elders fought colonial and imperial powers to protect communities and nature. Their legacy and those of all women who were part of various liberation movements continue. I feel connected to all women as part of a strong power base of worldwide resistance. We are nature and people protectors!”
 – Shenna, Friends of the Earth Europe

For the indigenous people who live in the Bolivian Amazon, life is hard. People are increasingly suffering from the effects of climate change, both forest fires caused by prolonged dry seasons and flooding due to more intense rainfall.  The flooding has the knock-on effect of causing malnutrition and disease because forest communities rely on firewood. When there is no dry wood, cooking food or boiling safe drinking water becomes extremely difficult and gas is often too expensive to get hold of.

The dependency on firewood not only reduces the unique biodiversity of the Amazon, collecting it and cooking with it is a time consuming and back breaking task which mainly falls on women. Deforestation also means these women must walk further and further to find the fuel they need to feed their families. It is estimated that women spend four hours a day cooking on wood and an hour collecting it.  

But now the versatility of renewable technology and the natural energy provided by the sun is starting to change all this.  Through its local partner organisations in the region, UK charity Christian Aid has started to give solar ovens to women. These orange boxes, powered by solar panels to capture sunlight, have already proven effective on the high plains of Bolivia where radiation is strong. But they have now been shown to also work further down, in the lower, more forested valleys, and even during the rainy season.  

At first it was unclear if families would adjust to the new contraptions having spent years cooking food in traditional ways on wood fires. But after plenty of practice and training women have become masters of what they now call ‘solar cooking’. They prepare the food in the morning, place it in the oven in a sunny spot and then let the power of the sun and human-made technology do the rest. It’s remarkable to see the oven lids opened after a few hours as clouds of steam emerge and pots full of delicious food are lifted out.

The 3 kilograms of firewood each family used to use for every meal is obviously a great saving for the forest, reducing deforestation and protecting the Amazonian ‘lungs of the earth’. For the women of the often-patriarchal communities the solar ovens have also had a transformative impact on their social and political lives too.

Doña Natividad Matareco, from the Bermejo region of Bolivia, said the saved time had allowed her and other women to become more politically empowered. “The Women Organisation in the community has meetings on Sundays in the afternoon,” she said. “We discuss important issues about the community. Before I could not attend the meetings because I thought ‘I cannot go, I have to cook. If my husband comes back and the food is not ready he will be upset’. But now I can attend the meetings. For me this is a big change. Now I can be in a meeting all day, discussing important community issues. As women, we need to decide ourselves that we have the right to participate, to organise ourselves, to look after ourselves.”

This newfound ‘spare time’ has also helped women’s economic empowerment too. In another community, Doña Esther Guarayuco, now is able to run a small shop. She explained: “I now have more free time which I use to clean my house, or to sew things with my sewing machine. I also have my small grocery store: I can do one thing and still sell.”

In the era of Donald Trump – whose behaviour towards women and threats to action on climate change are well known – it’s easy to feel despondent. But it’s worth remembering that in the jungles of the Amazon, away from the news headlines, environmental protection and gender justice is on the march.

This Author

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor to the Ecologist. He is on twitter @wareisjoe