English beaches have passed water quality tests again this year – with 98.3 percent making the grade. More than 400 beaches and lakes have reached the water quality standards and 92 percent were awarded the ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ rating.

This success builds on the dramatic improvements made to water quality in the last two decades and almost equals the best year on record despite the wetter summer. It’s been another good year for Cornwall with all bathing waters meeting the standards.

In Teignbridge, Devon, all bathing waters have met the excellent standard. This is a fantastic result and reflects all the work that has been carried out by partners and the Love your beach group.

Iconic seaside 

The results announced today will be proudly displayed at beaches and shared online for prospective visitors to check. Holidaymakers and swimmers who visit the English coastline continue to benefit from the efforts of water companies to protect bathing waters and from the joint work by councils, regulators, farmers and campaign groups to make further improvements.

The results have been heralded as a huge success despite the summer rain. Rainwater that runs off through urban areas and agricultural land into the sea can result in a temporary dip in water quality. This means water quality will fluctuate slightly each year depending on the weather.

Everyone has a part to play in protecting iconic seaside resorts by taking simple actions to keep beaches clean.

Huge success

Sir James Bevan, chief executive of the Environment Agency, said: “Maintaining such high water quality standards at English beaches is a huge success and a credit to all those individuals and organisations working hard to keep our bathing waters clean. 

“Water quality has improved significantly over the last two decades – but to protect and enhance water quality even further we will need everyone to take the small actions that will help.”

Visitors to beaches and local communities are urged to clear up and not leave mess on the beach. Every business and household can ensure they don’t contribute to pollution on beaches by not pouring fats down drains and not flushing wet wipes.

Cleanest class

In 2017 the public were also able to see more information online about water quality at any bathing beach.

Cllr Phil Bullivant, Teignbridge District Council’s executive member for recreation and leisure, said: “The beach is a great place to be at any time of the year and I am delighted to see that Teignbridge’s bathing waters have been awarded these results for the 2017 season.

“Teignmouth in particular has benefited from significant investment resulting in massive improvements to bathing waters and this is something we are really proud of. Back in 2014 it was at risk of being classed as poor and now it’s been awarded Excellent, the highest, cleanest class so this is really fantastic news.

“Bathing water standards need constant attention so there’s always more work to be done. We’ll keep working to improve our environment and make sure people who live and visit can enjoy keep enjoying them.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is Editor of The Ecologist website. 

The falsification of official documents has long been an open secret in laundering illegal timber from Peru’s Amazon, but no exporter has ever been exposed on camera explaining how it is done. Not until now, that is, after Global Witness has just released footage of three exporters caught up in Peru’s biggest timber scandal.

The Yacu Kallpa was the only ship transporting timber directly out of Peru’s Amazon to the USA. In September 2015 a shipment was blocked on arrival in Houston because much of it was suspected to be illegal, and then its very next shipment, leaving Peru in early December, was detained in Mexico before it could even make it to Houston. Peru’s forest inspections agency, OSINFOR, later concluded that more than 96 percent of the timber onboard was illegal.

Good faith

The footage just released, recorded on undercover camera, features three of the 11 exporters involved in the shipment that was detained in Mexico. All three – Corporación Industrial Forestal’s (CIF) Adam Andrews, Inversiones WCA’s William Castro and Sico Maderas’ Dante Zevallos – admitted that documents are frequently falsified and timber regularly laundered.

Arguably the most revealing remarks are made by Zevallos, who goes into considerable detail about how official documents to extract and transport timber from one area are often used for timber from somewhere else, where permission to operate has not been granted. Sometimes this includes national parks and other “protected natural areas”, reserves inhabited by indigenous peoples in living in “isolation”, indigenous communities, or other, unassigned areas.

Zevallos told Global Witness undercover: “I can easily know it’s [the timber] not coming from a good source, because if we all bought the way we should, no one would buy a plank. So even though I knew the timber I was buying probably had this origin, I wasn’t worried, because I had [the documents]. I was a buyer in good faith.” Asked if that was what happened with the Yacu Kallpa shipment in late 2015, Zevallos replied, “Yes, all of it.”

Blocking imports

Why does this footage matter? One, it exposes the central problem with Peru’s timber sector which is that the official documents mean little or nothing and the exporters themselves know this, despite what they claim publicly.

The most important documents to be falsified are transport permits and operating plans – the latter which have included 10,000s of faked tree locations and sometimes even faked villages.

Two, Peruvian prosecutors in Iquitos and two other Amazon towns are currently investigating the late 2015 Yacu Kallpa shipment. CIF’s Andrews and WCA’s Castro are among those being investigated, but Sico’s Zevallos isn’t.

The footage is potentially crucial evidence in securing successful prosecutions because it reveals how the exporters knew or could have presumed to know some or most of their timber was illegal. Under Peru’s Penal Code, that constitutes a crime and is punishable by up to seven years in prison.

Three, the United States Trade Representative (USTR) recently announced it is blocking imports from one of the other exporters involved in the Yacu Kallpa scandal: Inversiones La Oroza.

Source of livelihood

That decision has caused considerable controversy in Peru, and was made on the basis of Oroza exporting illegal timber on the Yacu Kallpa earlier in 2015. If the USTR suspends timber from Oroza, shouldn’t it suspend timber from CIF, WCA and Sico too?

Oroza isn’t among the exporters caught on Global Witness’s undercover footage, but does feature in an accompanying report, titled “Buyers in Good Faith.” Oroza transported more timber on the Yacu Kallpa in late 2015 than any other company.

Global Witness wrote to them with a series of arguments alleging why it knew or could have presumed to know its exports were illegally sourced, but representative Luis Ángel Ascencio Pomasunco responded with the standard defence that the timber had the correct documents approved by the regional government.

The release of this footage is very timely, as the world’s political leaders meet in Bonn, Germany, for the latest United Nations climate talks. Given that Peru’s Amazon is one of the biggest tropical forests on the planet, it has a potentially crucial role to play in combatting global warming.

One major way of fulfilling that role is to meet its comparatively ambitious forest conservation commitments for zero net deforestation by 2020, and to work towards the long-term sustainable management of its vast Amazon region – home and source of livelihood for several million people.

Doing that includes ensuring that powerful, illegal operators in the timber sector, whose influence extends to the absolutely most remote parts of Peru, are punished and that exporters or other buyers are unable to hide behind falsified official documents. The game is now up. Zevallos et al can no longer seriously claim they are “buyers in good faith.”

This Author

Laura Furones is the campaign director, Peru, for the environment and social justice charity Global Witness.

“Dieselgate” happened after governments – with decent intentions -pushed manufacturers towards diesel engines in cars as a way of cutting their carbon emissions.

We needn’t have had the disaster of air pollution that resulted – the manufacturers chose to cut costs rather than emissions of dangerous gases and particulates – but the issue nonetheless highlights an important topic that needs to be addressed whenever we talk about climate change: the other impacts of the choices we make.

The scandal came to my mind when I was at a session last week at the Bonn climate talks, where the chemistry industry was setting out its flag for what it had done to tackle climate change.

Organic matter

It reminded me a lot of an earlier session with the International Marine Organisation, where there was talk of polished propellers, cleaner hulls and computer-guide routing – things that save companies money and nibble at the edges of the giant mountain of carbon reduction we need to climb. Here we got slightly more efficient processes and LED lightbulbs.

What was presented as a flagship was the Nitric Acid Climate Action Group, funded by the German government, which is offering free help to companies in 32 countries to cut the emissions of the highly potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide from chemical plants, which are chiefly producing nitrogen fertilisers.

The first question that might be put to that, as it was from the audience, was whether subsidising big, often multinational, companies who should be making these steps anywhere was the best way to proceed. Good question.

But there’s an even more fundamental issue here. When the end product, nitrogen fertiliser, is used on the ground, recent research has shown that it produces far more nitrous oxide emissions than had been thought.

And even more than that, it damages soil health and fertility, by reducing the organic matter in the soil and the availability of organic nitrogen. An old Dutch proverb says that fertiliser is good for the father and bad for the sons.

Getting people thinking

Counting emissions of this product shouldn’t end at the factory gate. It needs to consider the full costs of its production (which is unavoidably high energy) and use.

Now the industry will say, as a Canadian representative did when I put these points, that we need the fertiliser to grow food. But we need to keep growing food for many decades, indeed centuries, and destroying the soil, as industrial agriculture is doing, is not the way to do that. 

When I asked the panel how we could prevent climate change decisions having disastrous impacts in other areas, Dr Arunabha Ghosh, from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water in India, gave what I thought was a good answer: we should ensure every decision is guided by checking against the Sustainable Development Goals – the 17 aims covering essentials of human life and environmental survival – which we are aiming to achieve by 2030. “Every action and policy has to be consistent with these,” he said.

An alternative, more industry-focused answer came in a later discussion with the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA), in the form of ISO14001, a system of certification of environmental standards that builds in “integrated systems thinking” with a focus on resilience and resource efficiency.

I have some doubts whether that goes anything like far enough or fast enough, but it is a start, with about half a million company users worldwide. And it is getting people thinking in the right way.

Politics and economics

For while climate change is a pressing, existential issue for the human race, it isn’t the only one. Choking our planet with plastics, poisoning it with pesticides and herbicides and trashing its soils are all pushing right at the limits of what this Earth can absorb.

We cannot afford most of the products that the people in that room in Bonn are now producing. Cutting their emissions risks making it appear they can continue (and often cuts their costs at the same time). It may be the worst possible thing to do.

As a speaker from the brilliant Via Campesina global farmers’ group said in another session: “Climate change is a systemic problem of politics and economics. It can’t be solved with new technology.”

This Author

Natalie Bennett is the former co-leader of the Green party. She is in Bonn with the Green Economics Institute. She tweets at @natalieben.  

Rural Nepalese villages are putting a number of innovative green measures in place to safeguard their future.

Landlocked within the rocky Himalayan region, Nepal is extremely vulnerable not only to climate change but to various natural disasters.

In April 2015, the country was left devastated by an earthquake that measured up to 8.1 in magnitude (within the most severe earthquake class bracket) and killed nearly 9,000 people.

Rainwater harvesting

According to the United Nations Programme in Nepal, there were more the 27,000 deaths in the country between 1971-2007 due to natural disasters – that’s an average of two deaths a day.

An increase in climate change and the future risks presented by natural disasters place an urgency of Nepalese villages to become more resilient and adaptable to environmental change.

Agriculture and energy are the two main areas where villagers are implementing a mix of traditional and innovative measures to combat this, including clean energy projects, organic farming methods, recycling schemes and the creation of a self-sustaining eco-village.

“We have rainwater harvesting, solar energy and use cow dung and urine to create organic pesticides,” begins Bishwo Raj Adhikari – the creator of the Annapurna Eco-village.

“There used to be lots of chemical usage and artificial fertilisers in my village but we have started a campaign to lower the use of chemicals, which is helping our soil and improving our lifestyle.”

More mosquitos

Bishwo and his family set up the village, which is located at the foot of the Himalayas’ Annapurna range, in 2004 as a lodge for trekkers as well as a meditation and yoga retreat for tourists who want to escape the city and experience a little nature but it is fair to say that the village is much more than a tourist get-away.

The family have created an impressive farm, growing a variety of fruits, vegetables, coffee and sugar cane, whilst using their livestock’s waste to create organic pesticides and fertilisers.

A trained porter and trekker for over 20 years, Bishwo knows the Himalayan region intimately and explains how the environment in which he has spent a large part of his life has change significantly over the years.

Bishwo says that in traditionally cooler regions like the lower Mustang district, he has started seeing an increase in different species, which are typically drawn to warmer climates.

“I see more mosquitos now in Jomsom when I go trekking as well as more leeches and snakes. This has changed a lot since 1991 when I started as a porter.”

First stopover

Climate change is also having a negative effect on region’s crops, according to Bishwo, who says Hemja village, which is famous for its orange groves, nowadays has trouble growing orange trees at all.

Tourism is also playing a part in this environmental change as well as a lack of environmental awareness among some of the villages – particularly when it comes to littering.

There are no bins available along the trekking routes and there are no formal recycling schemes in place within the communities, which leads to many tourists and locals frequently littering plastic bottles and packaging along the trekking route.

Bishwo and his family have set up a recycling scheme at their village to tackle this and are reaching out to nearby families, schools and hospitals to increase environmental awareness and encourage people to reduce their waste.

Elsewhere, an innovative scheme to tackle littering is taking place in the picturesque village of Ghandruk, which is a popular first stopover for trekkers on their way to Annapurna.

Micro hydropower 

Local mothers, with help from The Alternative Energy Promotion Centre and the Annapurna Conservation Project, have begun to sell filtered jars of water to locals and trekkers.

The scheme has had a number of benefits. Not only does it utilise the electricity created by the region’s Bhurgyu Khola Micro Hydropower for the filtration system but it reduces the need for plastic water bottles and empowers the local women, who run the business.

Other clean energy initiatives in the region have been making headway. The United Nations Development Programme in Nepal is now well in to its Renewable Energy for Rural Livelihood project, which started in 2014.

The scheme, which runs until 2019, was set up to provide electricity through renewable energy schemes to the 30 per cent of rural Nepalese households, who have no access to power.

Among its achievements is the completion of 423 micro hydropower plants across Nepal, which collectively have a capacity of 9.1MW and have connected over 94,131 households.

Nature and climate

The RERL scheme has also installed two biomass gasifiers in Sarlahi District, on the south west border of Nepal, and has plans to build further hydropower plants and solar PV systems across the country.

Clearly there is plenty of scope for Nepal to lead the way on clean energy, with an abundance of mountains and hills as well as the potential to replicate some of the green initiatives that are already taking place in certain villages.

Bishwo hopes that his eco-village can become a model for other Nepalese families in the region. With further support from the government Bishwo believes that green schemes “could save Nepal’s culture, nature and climate”. “

This Author

Robyn Wilson is a freelance journalist currently writing and travelling across Asia. She is a former news editor at Construction News. She blogs at Weird Fishes and tweets at @RobynFWilson.

An article by Martin Lukacs in The Guardian argued that to fight climate change we must stop being preoccupied with how we personally live, and instead must tackle corporate power collectively.

“While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant,” he wrote. “The breakdown of carbon emissions since 1988? A hundred companies alone are responsible for an astonishing 71 percent. You tinker with those pens or that panel; they go on torching the planet.

“The freedom of these corporations to pollute – and the fixation on a feeble lifestyle response – is no accident. It is the result of an ideological war, waged over the last forty years, against the possibility of collective action.”

Our own terms

Lukacs smartly argues that neoliberal ideologies stand in the way when collective action is needed more than ever. Neoliberalism has exalted the individual at the expense of our collective bonds: we are encouraged to think of ourselves as consumers, not citizens.

And so we are told to tackle climate change with our personal cash (if we can afford it) and not our community. Being a ‘green’ consumer might help us to feel less guilty, but it is only collective action that will effectively tackle the climate crisis, Lukacs says.

I agree with him, yet it’s not helpful to suggest that fixing the climate crisis involves a battle of us vs them, goodies vs baddies, or a choice between collective or individual. If we are to fix the crisis we need human stories that remind us who we are, what we love, and how we’re connected, so that we can generate sustained collective action.

I recently read one of these stories in Paul Kingsnorth’s Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. Author and former ‘green activist’ Kingsnorth became an environmentalist “because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places, and the world beyond the human”.

But disillusionment struck, and Kingsnorth chose a life of self-sufficiency instead. He now nurtures his own small patch of nature with his family – far from the hands of “our obsession with climate change” which builds solar farms and wind farms and machinery that allows us to “sustain human civilisation” of approaching 10 billion on our own terms.

Empire-resistors

Kingsnorth echoes Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation”. But rather than protest to ‘save the world’ as his younger self so passionately did, Kingsnorth decided to help create new stories for our time – to understand where we’ve come from, and where we might be headed – even if that means facing a dark abyss.

So Kingsnorth and colleague Dougald Hine created the ‘Dark Mountain Project’ in 2009, with the ‘Uncivilisation’ manifesto at its core, which consists of eight guiding principles, e.g:

“Principle 2: We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’…

“Principle 4: We will reassert the role of story-telling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.”

True to the manifesto, Kingsnorth highlights story and myth in Confessions. Looking at ancient drawings in a cave in France, or at the English green men who resisted the Norman conquest of their ways of life, Kingsnorth takes us through mysterious landscapes of nature-lovers, storytellers and empire-resistors.

Tackle the crisis

He conjures EF Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful when he talks about people who dwelt as part of nature, not separate from it. He encourages giving a voice to wilderness (which might have something to say to us, if only we would listen).

This individual ‘small’ (which includes stories of his family’s composting toilet, and his scything practice) feels romanticised against the behemoth of climate change, politics, and collective activism. But rather than see small as escapism (which he has been criticised for), Kingsnorth sees it as necessary. It’s where we call home, and learn to love a place.

His stories of place and connection sparkle with an individual inspiration that can only lead to collective action. It reminds me of the solitary stories of Annie Dillard as she explores her beloved patch of wild in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, decades ago.

Yet those stories have no doubt catalysed countless individual and collective responses that continue to protect the natural world. And so any argument that presents the solutions to climate change as an individual vs. collective choice feels too simplistic, not whole enough.

I read Lukacs’ piece with a fire — Let’s fight! Let me at ‘em! — but then a tiredness descends that I recognise from so many articles I have read before; the tiredness that comes with being told there is a ‘better’ way of solving the climate crisis; that comes with the thought that we spend so much time talking about the right and wrong way to tackle the crisis that we mistakenly feel we’ve actually done the work, when all we’ve done is talk.

Corporate powers 

And to suggest that individual efforts simply make us feel “happier and healthier” downplays the fact that these efforts add up, and corporations must respond. We cannot disconnect small actions from mass movements. Each fosters understanding of and commitment to the other.

Kingsnorth’s Confessions, and other heart-led stories and people I come across, blow the cobwebs out of that dichotomy of either / or; his words are poetic yet essential, contemplative yet cutting.

Kingsnorth (and alongside him, authors like Annie Dillard, Rebecca Solnit, Robert Macfarlane and many others) calls us to look honestly into the void  – individually and collectively, assessing the helpfulness of a blindly optimistic future versus a hopefully mysterious, unknown one. It’s ok not to know what comes next – but we don’t need to do that alone.

Through nature and wonder; through communities like the Dark Mountain project and by asking the right questions, we can tentatively and bravely say we don’t know what’s in store, but we’re willing to look, and to celebrate the uniqueness of our individual strengths and stories, as we walk there together.

It doesn’t have to be either / or. So let’s tackle the corporate powers collectively.

Understanding and alternatives

But let’s also leave space for those stories and practices that sparkle and shout to us, which call us to care in the first place. When we get face-to-face with those corporate powers, I think it is these stories, our shape, and our sense of place that will help us hold our ground, and link arm-to-arm with our neighbours.

And we must not forget that corporate powers are made up of millions of humans; they are not distinct from us — they are also our neighbours.

They are us, just as we are all nature. If we reject the false dichotomy of individual vs. collective, then maybe we’ll work to uncover the stories that bind us, and the empathy, understanding and alternatives that could save us – and I mean the ‘us’ that includes humans as part of nature, not separate from it.

This Author:

Elizabeth Wainwright is the Ecologist’s Nature Editor. She spends her time between Devon, London, and wild spaces. She also co-leads a global community development charity, Arukah Network. You can read the full Dark Mountain manifesto here.