Blue Clipper, a 33-metre three-masted tall ship, will set sail to explore Arctic territory on 28 June. But this isn’t a re-enactment of Roald Amundsen’s exploits – this is a very modern expedition. These voyagers, mostly students from Exeter University, are intent on finding evidence of a new kind of landmark – one made of plastic.

The Sail Against Plastic expedition will set out from the remote Svalbard islands to the icy waters of the Barents Sea to collect evidence that the area has become a sixth major accumulation zone for marine plastic pollution.

The latest issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

Five marine pollution zones have been confirmed so far – including the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They are formed when plastic and other debris are caught by ocean currents and trapped in the centre of gyre systems. Recent research suggests that a sixth exists in the Arctic.

More than research

As well as observational surveys, the team intends to use a manta trawl – a metal box with two wings that skims along the surface of the water – to collect samples of microplastic debris. “We’re doing surface surveys because, of the few that have been carried out in the Arctic, not many have been done on the surface of the water, particularly in the area we’re going to,” Tom Auld, a second-year zoology student at Exeter University, told Resurgence & Ecologist.

“We’re still thinking that we might sample to about 50 metres by other methods. The big thing is that, because of the way the currents act around the Barents Sea, it might actually be a sink, so there are hypotheses that a lot of plastic would have drifted down to the bottom. Obviously that’s a bit hard to reach, so we’ll wait for other studies.”

Auld studies at a campus near the seaside town of Falmouth in Cornwall. He and his fellow students often organise beach cleans to deal with the constant presence of plastic pollution washed up on the shore.

As well as sailors and scientists, the 18-strong team will include photographers, artists and writers, who will help produce a variety of work, from a film to a children’s book. This is because research is just one goal of the trip, Auld explains.

Tracking sound pollution

“The other goal is to reach as big and as wide an audience as possible. Our feeling is that through the use of these arts we’ll create a useful and long-lasting impact rather than something that will go towards being published as scientific work that won’t really reach the public eye. So we wanted to do both.”

As well as microplastics, the team will collect evidence of other ‘unseen’ pollution – sound – to be collected using a hydrophone. The data will be used to map how marine life is being affected by human disruption, in particular commercial fishing.

“The Barents Sea is a large commercial fishery and no one has any information on how this is affecting the marine mammals. So we want to figure out the impact,” Auld says. “We don’t know yet whether we’ll do this as a live feed, constantly listening to the small sounds of mammals and boats, or whether we’ll do a few sounds each day.”

The trip has been partially crowdfunded, but even if all the costs aren’t covered this way, the team is  still committed to going. “We’ve agreed we’ll pay for it ourselves if we have to,” Auld says.

Community outreach

The expedition isn’t just about making the team’s names as discoverers and explorers through science and art. Auld says they want to show solidarity with other communities directly affected by marine pollution, including communities in Svalbard.

The team is intending to run beach cleans with schools on the islands when they return from the voyage. This is for both practical and symbolic reasons. “The problem with Svalbard is that most of the plastic pollution is not from there at all, but is washed up there,” says Auld.

“I think it’s important to showcase that other countries care about the problem and that the UK stands with the locals in Svalbard in doing something about it.”

This Author

Marianne Brown is Deputy Editor of Resurgence & Ecologist, where this article first appeared. Download a free sample copy here. For updates on the expedition visit the website.

The long awaited plans for a green watchdog have now been released, and despite promises of a ‘gold standard’ of environmental protection after Brexit, the reality leaves a lot to be desired.

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) sought consultation on its first proposals for a ‘Green Brexit’ which included provisions for a new watchdog and plans to incorporate environmental principles into domestic law after the UK leaves the EU.

While there was some good news in the government recognising the need for a new body to protect the environment through law, the plans proposed in the consultation document would create a toothless body seriously lacking in legal punch.

New opportunity 

Strong institutional governance mechanisms are needed to properly oversee, implement and enforce environmental law. For the past 40 years, EU institutions have worked to ensure the effectiveness of the laws which defend the habitats of wildflowers and butterflies, protect the health of our children’s lungs and ensure the safety of the water we drink.

The UK’s departure from the EU opens up a governance gap in environmental law. As recognised by Michael Gove, the environment secretary, this presents an opportunity to create a new world-leading body capable of holding the powerful to account.

If done properly, it will provide greater protection to the natural world. In designing this new body, we should not be limited to simply replicating the imperfect EU model. Instead, we should build something that learns from best practices from across the world which can be truly revolutionary in its approach to enforcing environmental law.

Unfortunately, the department’s current plans do not point in that direction. The consultation suggests that the government’s preferred option is for the watchdog to be unable to initiate legal proceedings and to only have oversight roles over central government – so not over other public bodies. 

But to be truly effective, a green watchdog must have the power to take all public bodies to court when they fail in their duty to protect people and the planet.

We need a watchdog with sharp legal teeth which is able to issue meaningful orders requiring specific actions by public bodies. And it should be possible for these orders to be backed up by the courts. Without these powers, there is a real risk that environmental laws remain impotent on statute books rather than working to protect the natural world.  

Another faceless bureaucracy

The need for robust governance mechanisms is particularly important to uphold environmental law because it defends the interests of people and nature – rather than the narrow economic interests of individuals.

The beneficiaries of such laws – rivers and forests, bogs and bees – are multiple, diverse and frequently, from a legal perspective, voiceless. As such, it is crucial that a green watchdog is empowered to provide an authoritative and influential voice that can speak on their behalf. 

The plans outlined by the consultation also fail to guarantee that the new watchdog will be able to receive complaints directly from the public or that it will have oversight powers over local authorities and other public bodies.

This risks dislocating the watchdog from the people and communities that stand to benefit from its activities. Instead, it risks becoming yet another faceless bureaucracy.

The watchdog must be empowered to reach out and work with communities affected by environmental issues, involving them not only in identifying problems, but also in developing solutions to the problems they are facing.

These are key functions which are needed to ensure that the watchdog can adequately engage with people’s specific concerns and sufficiently supervise the actions and decisions of agencies which might negatively affect the environment. 

If these issues are not remedied, the watchdog will simply serve as a reminder of a missed opportunity to introduce the strong system of governance which our natural world so desperately needs.  

This Author

Tom West is a law and policy researcher for the environmental lawyers, ClientEarth.

A ten-week government consultation which explores how England will move away from European Agricultural policy post Brexit has recently ended.

The consultation has been far reaching both in terms of content and engagement, recognising a once in a lifetime opportunity to shape the English countryside for the benefit of all.

Among the topics discussed has been the use of public money for public goods – and this is particularly relevant for uplands, where farm businesses often operate on extremely small profit margins. It is not un-typical for a farm to generate a profit margin of £5000 a year – that’s ‘take home’ pay to you and I.
 

To address this, current and past Common Agricultural Policy upland farms have been supported with a combination of production subsidies, agri-environment grants, diversification funds and structural tools.

This has led to commentators – including George Monbiot – to suggest that such devices have led to an impoverished landscape devoid of biodiversity as farming businesses ‘mine’ the land.

So why do the uplands justify such support through the public purse? Criticisms such as these have some justification, but the issue is more subtle than that.

Surveys by Natural England demonstrate uplands are some of the most biodiverse environments we have, containing many habitats derived from the very traditional agricultural practices condemned by others.

The issue is not the grazing per se, it’s how much grazing goes on. All grasslands can be overgrazed and the CAP has encouraged this, but under-grazing can be a problem too with the build-up of dead plant matter smothering out other more desirable plants, and uncontrolled bracken encroachment.

Biodiversity is just one example of a public good derived from uplands. Other public goods include: flood management, a very real issue for many towns and cities downstream where flooding is becoming more prevalent due to climate change; the production of cultural heritage through traditional farming practices such as drystone wall construction and other vernacular structures, and carbon storage through effective management of peat and other soils.

Rural communities

As well as public goods, upland farm businesses also produce food – beef, lamb and dairy. They directly support tourism and recreation by providing accommodation, access and activities.

Upland agriculture also maintains rural communities and through them services for other non-farming families. Indeed, it is one of the five cornerstones of the inscription of the UKs latest World Heritage Site of the Lake District in July 2017.

So it makes you wonder why upland agriculture receives such a bad press. While ‘bad farming’ is often shallowly blamed, there are, in fact, a number of deeper reasons why uplands are not managed effectively as they could be.

The challenges

First, there is the perpetuation of uplands being a marginal domain. This marginality has been re-emphasised in policy, thus rather than celebrating what uplands have it has spent time bewailing what they do not.

Second, at their core, upland land users share resources for multiple purposes. This brings different land users in direct conflict with others who want something else, as well as often not understanding where each is coming from.

Third, land ownership patterns are complex. In a single valley there can be over forty land owners; divided between public, private and in many instances commoners, who have rights of management which supersede the landowner.

Fourth, there are resources in uplands with have complex property rights. Some relate to right of common, as above, others in relation to simple public access along a footpath; or even connected to management, say, of water quality in a reservoir, but the surrounding land may not be under the same ownership. This creates different, complex webs of stakeholders for every single challenge.

Centralised power

Fifth, there is silo management, whereby a single user manages a single land function and thus they do not recognise their effect on other resource users.

Penultimately, there is too much centralised power and control. Many agencies responsible for resource management in uplands operate a ‘top down’ philosophy. Here external ‘experts’ come in and tell the local resource managers how it should be done.

Finally, land is not managed in meaningful units. Administrative areas rarely fit natural physical or ecological units. A single farm can cut across different altitudes, catchments and habitats, but with its neighbours, it may not.

So we really do know what the issues are, the question repeatedly discussed over the last seventy years – how depressing is that? – is how do we make uplands more effective not only at producing public goods, but vibrant rural communities and sustainable land management practices all in one go?

Land use

How do we cut through the structural challenges and make them truly multifunctional? To this we need to transcend the single land use.

We need to approach the issue using resource management rather than land use management. We need to be multifunctional and we need to trust the people who already live, work and manage the uplands.

There are in fact, many schemes operating that attempt to do this. The Pickering ‘Slow the Flow’ project is a very famous example, where flooding in the town has been tackled through soft landscape engineering in the upper catchment – working will all the stakeholders.

Other less well known ideas include the application of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach in the Peak District where farming families are encouraged and supported to realise all their farm assets to improve their standard of living.

The Northern Uplands Local Nature Partnership is an umbrella organising bringing together all the Pennines spine National Parks and AONBs to develop holistic joined up solutions across the entire territory.

There are many examples of effective upland management, but the lessons often remain unshared. Therefore, we need a tool kit for upland managers, whether they be farmers, foresters, water managers,commoners, landowners or communities.

My book does this by using a resource management approach supported by a range of real life upland case studies where it really does work. Our uplands are our heritage and our legacy, we need to look after them.

This Author

Dr Lois Mansfield is a principal lecturer at the Department of Science, Natural Resources & Outdoor Studies at the University of Cumbria. She’s also a research lead for the Ecosystem Services strand for Centre for national Parks & Protected Areas. Her latest book is Managing Upland Resources: New Approaches for Rural Environments.

South Georgia has been declared free of rodents for the first time in more than two hundred years. 

Invasive mice and rats arrived on South Georgia as stowaways on sealing and whaling vessels from the late 18th century onwards and preyed on ground-nesting and burrowing birds. 

The introduced rodents have had a devastating effect on these birds, which evolved in the absence of natural predators and were becoming increasingly confined to rodent-free small offshore islands. 

Millions of birds

Professor Mike Richardson, chairman of the South Georgia Heritage Trust  Habitat Restoration Project Steering Committee, said: “South Georgia Heritage Trust is delighted to declare that its Habitat Restoration Project is complete and that invasive rodents have been successfully eradicated from the island. 

“It has been a privilege to work on this conservation project, the largest of its kind anywhere in the world, and I am immensely proud of what the small charity has achieved – it has been a huge team effort.

He added: “The popular BBC series Blue Planet highlighted our shared environmental challenges and raised awareness of South Georgia’s importance to seabirds and nature more widely. We hope the results from this project will continue to inspire others to help protect our natural world.”

The rodents have threatened the existence of two endemic species found nowhere else on Earth: the South Georgia pipit and South Georgia pintail.

The Habitat Restoration Project was launched ten years ago with the aim of reversing two centuries of human-induced damage to the island’s wildlife, so that millions of birds could reclaim their ancestral home. 

Rodent free

The last of the poisoned bait was left more than two years ago, but scientists have continued to monitor the island for any sign of rodent life.

Deploying various detection devices including  chewsticks, tracking tunnels and three highly trained ‘sniffer dogs’, the team covered over 1500km of harsh, mountainous terrain in often extreme weather conditions to ensure the entire area was surveyed.

Richardson said: “Thanks to the outstanding work of the passionate and committed members of Team Rat and the Board of Trustees, the birds of South Georgia are free from the threat of rodents. 

“The Trust can now turn its attention and efforts to working with the Government of South Georgia & the South Sandwich Islands on conservation of a different kind: the conservation and reinterpretation of the island’s historic cultural heritage to educate and enlighten future generations about our environment.”

Lord Gardiner, the Parliamentary under-secretary at DEFRA, said: “The UK is proud to be custodian of the precious and unique biodiversity of 14 Overseas Territories, most of which are island environments, like South Georgia, that are highly vulnerable to environmental change.

“The last ten years has seen a step-change in how the UK responds to invasive non-native species and the rodent eradication work completed by the South Georgia Heritage Trust is undoubtedly among the most remarkable of recent island conservation efforts. This successful project gives confidence and offers hope for invasive alien species management around the globe.”

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor of The Ecologist. This story is based on a news release from The South Georgia Heritage Trust.

A fatal brain infection caused by malformed proteins called prions – Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)— is ripping through deer, elk, and moose populations across the US – but  studies have shown that mountain lions may play a role in slowing the spread.

The incurable disease was first discovered in Colorado in 1967 in captive mule deer and now infects cervids across most of the US, two Canadian provinces, Norway, and South Korea. Highly contagious, CWD is spread directly from animal to animal or via vegetation laced with contaminated urine, faeces, or saliva.

As scientists scramble to try to stem the outbreaks, one of their most promising findings involves mountain lions targeting infected mule deer, a phenomenon that may reduce the concentration of the prion in the wild.  

Lions prey on infected deer

“If predation, or some other removal process, was preferentially focused on infected animals…and removed infected animals at a relatively high rate and relatively early in the disease course, then chronic wasting disease might be suppressed,” Dr Michael W. Miller, a senior wildlife veterinarian with Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) told The Ecologist. 

In 2009, Miller co-authored a study published in Biology Letters that fitted nine mountain lions with GPS collars in Colorado’s Front Range and tracked them over a three-year period.

The study concluded that adult mule deer preyed upon by lions were more likely to have CWD than deer shot by hunters, “suggesting that mountain lions were selecting for infected individuals when they targeted adult deer.” 

“The subtle behaviour changes in prion-infected deer may be better signals of vulnerability than body condition, and these cues may occur well before body condition noticeably declines,” according to the study.

In other words, the keystone predator may be more effective at culling sick deer than hunters who rely on more obvious signs of emaciation that occur in later stages of the disease.

What’s more, the lions consumed over 85 percent of carcasses, including brains, thereby removing a significant amount of contamination from the environment. 

High infection rates

Miller was also lead author of a 2008 study published in PLoS One that found prion infection in Front Range mule deer herds led to a fourfold increase in predation by lions.

However, the study also pointed out the “remarkably high infection rates”—up to one-quarter—of local deer, indicating that lions are far from a silver bullet.

Just the same, based on the solid data showing the predator’s preference for CWD-infected deer, it behooves one to ask whether an increase in predator population might make a significant dent in preventing future outbreaks.

Paradoxically, instead of working to boost the number of lions in Colorado, CPW is doing the opposite. 

Increasing mule deer numbers

Together, two of the agency’s predator control plans, the Piceance Basin Predator Management Plan and Upper Arkansas River Predator Management Plan, would eliminate between 15 and 45 mountain lions (and 30 to 75 black bear) over a period of three years on Colorado’s Western Slope and over half of the mountain lion population in a 2,370-square-mile area in south-central Colorado.

The killing would be carried out through the use of cage traps and foot snares, tracking by hounds, and dispatching via firearms.

CPW’s intention with the Piceance Basin plan is to “evaluate the extent to which predation is limiting deer population size,” citing local newborn fawn survival rates at less than 40 percent, which the agency blames “largely” on predators. 

While CPW’s eventual goal is to increase mule deer numbers in the state from the current 450,000 to 560,000, the agency admits that killing predators isn’t the “solution” to getting there.

Impact of habitat fragmentation

Michelle Lute, a wildlife coexistence campaigner for WildEarth Guardians—who travels up and down the Rocky Mountain front from her office in Missoula, Montana—says lions are wrongly scapegoated for the decline in deer numbers.

Instead, she thinks more attention should be paid to how deer are being “impacted by oil and gas and habitat fragmentation, and degradation that is associated with that.”

Over the last couple of decades, Colorado has seen a significant amount of fracking for natural gas, and the Piceance Basin is no exception.  

In 2006, CPW (formerly Colorado Division of Wildlife) arranged for a land exchange with Shell Oil in the area, and noted a decline in deer numbers due, in part, to “changes in human use primarily related to energy development.” 

Fossil fuels extraction created an “extensive” road network in the Basin, which the agency said has “most likely been responsible for reducing deer populations in the area.”

Forecasting more oil and gas development, CPW “anticipated increased impacts to deer and elk in the area.”

Avoiding political backlash

Peer-reviewed studies, such as one published in 2017 in Global Change Biology, backs up these claims.

Mule deer and energy development—Long-term trends of habituation and abundance by Hall Sawyer et. al., found that “following fifteen years of natural gas development in western Wyoming, mule deer did not habituate to disturbance and continued to avoid energy infrastructure.”

In fact, the study found “no evidence” of mule deer living any closer than an average one kilometre from gas wells. 

“You aren’t going to be able to have these historic mule deer numbers unless you start doing something very serious in terms of habitat,” says Stuart Wilcox, Denver-based staff attorney for WildEarth Guardians.

“CPW just indicated at every stop that they’re not really willing to take a strong stand on that.” 

“It’s not really a study,” he says of the Piceance Basin plan. “They’re covering it in the guise of science to try and temper the political backlash against it.”

A major part of this backlash involves three ongoing lawsuits launched by the organisation, along with Center for Biological Diversity and the Humane Society, in an attempt to get CPW to abandon the hunt. 

Mismanaging the issue

Wilcox says that increasing deer numbers in the Basin without expanding suitable habitat will result in “overbrowsing” of the landscape, which can cause more “sickly” animals prone to CWD.

“You’re going to see CWD infections and deaths go up in this area as the result of CPW mismanagement of this issue,” he says. “And that’s sad because it could be—if not avoided—mitigated.”

Furthermore, CPW’s vision of management doesn’t just mean less lions, it also may influence the behaviour of those left alive, says Lute, whose Ph.D. focused on conflicts between humans and carnivores. 

Lute says typical predator populations keep prey species in check—which can limit CWD—but hunting them “affects behaviour and that affects interspecies interaction and that can affect how predators hunt their prey, when they hunt their prey, and where they hunt their prey.”

Leave well alone

So what’s to be done about Chronic Wasting Disease in the state? 

“I think the solution is a simple one,” says Lute. “It’s that we don’t really need nearly as much wildlife management as we’re used to thinking we do.”

Lute believes the first and most important step for dealing with CWD is to address habitat degradation and fragmentation from the oil and gas and other industries.

“Other than that, mountain lion and mule deer have been together a long time before we started mucking up the system, so they’re fine on their own,” she says.

But if habitat continues to dwindle, what does that mean for the future of deer, elk, and moose in Colorado? 

Uncertain future for cervids

A February 2018 report from CPW found that infection in Colorado deer and elk herds appears to be rising, shrinking the lifespan of the animals and striking fawns at a younger age.

It cautions that, if rates get too high, “CWD can affect a herd’s ability to sustain itself.” 

What these disturbing trends mean for the future of cervid populations in Colorado—or anywhere else the disease has taken hold—and the vital role herds play in balancing a given ecosystem, remains to be seen. 

This Author

Josh Schlossberg is a freelance journalist.

Amitav Ghosh posed the question in 2016: ‘where is the fiction about climate change?’ He argued that there was a confounding paucity of literary writing ‘about’ environmental disaster.

This question warrants an urgent rearticulation, as last week’s ‘Creative Climate’ symposium argued rigorously.

Regardless of what our literature is ostensibly ‘about’ – it is, persistently if defiantly – happening in climate change: our art occurs in its heat, its airs, its force, and its dearth.

Performance times

7 o’clock, upon a stage, from a script. It’s tempting to think of theatre as the product of marks and measures: it has its time and its place, its arc, and we position ourselves accordingly.

There is, however, only so much that the fourth wall can keep at bay. Increasingly, directors and producers are reimagining what it means to create theatre in the context of climate crisis, attentive to the ways in which environmental threats change our sense of space and time, of intervention and interaction.

Climate change necessitates art that relates performance-space to the world-at-large, and allows it to reach out beyond momentary experience to inform everyday behaviours.

Zoë Svendsen, artistic director of METIS, began the day with her keynote: ‘Capital is Unnatural’. Her work explores how interdisciplinary performance projects can interrogate political subjects and economic systems.

Nature, she argued, has been excluded from the central structures of dramatic form. The task, then, is not simply to represent it, but to co-opt its symbiotic structures, to embrace simultaneity and interdependence.

Vulture capitalism

In September 2018, the Barbican will host her immersive installation piece We Know Not What We May Be, commissioned by the Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios Residency Programme, and part of the Barbican’s Art of Change season.

Taking its name from the words of Shakespeare’s maddened prophet Ophelia, and composed in collaboration with environmental, economic, and architectural experts, the piece will encourage its audience to collectively envision and ‘rehearse’ an ecologically sustainable future.    

Svendsen’s work brings the overarching reality of climate change to bear on socio-political speculation: carbon tax, universal basic income, automation.

Her work is restlessly prospective, and insists that audiences look outwards from the installation to the world around it. In this theatre, everyone cultivates their own capacity as an actor who can effect change.

Svendsen’s keynote at Creative Climate related her practice to the urgency and extremity of climate change and its ‘increasing levels of deep unpredictability’. For her, a destructive economic model of ‘vulture capitalism’ can be undone through meaningfully social theatre and its collaborative networks of making and thinking.

The remainder of the Creative Climate symposium showcased a range of exciting projects that confront the climate change by placing it at the centre of their practice:

Hive Minds

Artist Lily Hunter-Green (Birkbeck) and molecular biologist Luigi Aloia (University of Cambridge) are collaborating on a dynamic new project that explores ecological disruption and the decline of bees and animal pollinators.

This work is a continuation of Hunter-Green’s project Bee Composed, in which she converted a redundant piano into a working beehive.

She harvested live footage and sounds, from which she devised an original composition that was ‘played’ through a second piano. Audience members could view the piano-hive remotely through a Skype link fitted within this second instrument.

‘The intention’, Hunter-Green writes, ‘is to create a simulacrum “hive-mind”. That is, a unique microcosmic space that enables audience members to experience the inner dynamics and scientific happenings of the hive’.

This resonant superorganism represents ‘togetherness, the power of collective action, and the importance of community’. Here, theatre arises as part of an ongoing process in which process and product are mutually constitutive.

Shoot the Breeze

Artistic Director of Camden People’s Theatre discussed its 12 day festival Shoot the Breeze, which addressed climate change and pollution Its centrepiece was Fog Everywhere, produced in collaboration with teenage Londoners and the Lung Biology Group at King’s College London.

The play was staged in London, a city which breached its annual limit on air pollution by 5th January. In this play, local young people took to the stage to dramatise the ways in which air toxicity is producing an asphyxiating ‘ecoanxiety’ among the city’s young people.

Zazu Dreams

Cara Judea Alhadeff’s book Zazu Dreams between the  Scarab and the Dung Beetle: A Cautionary Fable for the Anthropocene Era, illustrated with 70 paintings by Micaela Amateau Amato, is a magical tale of environmental justice in which a Sephardic Arab Jewish boy and his imaginary husky traverse the globe on a humpback whale.

It utilises storytelling as an agent of social change and what Alhadeff calls ‘action-based empathy’. The story cultivates an ‘eco-literacy’ that helps readers to challenge agribusiness and petro-pharmaculture through indigenous philosophies and technologies.

Common Salt

Sheila Ghelani’s Common Salt is a participatory show-and-tell that explores England’s colonial history through objects related to the Indian Salt Hedge.

Told through the lives of objects as common as table salt, the discursive project comprises a meditation on the wall, the ‘hedge fund’, and on nature as it is put into service to human commerce.

Ecological Theatre

In her trenchant 1994 essay ‘There Must be a Lot of Fish in that Lake: Towards and Ecological Theatre’, Una Chaudhuri writes that: ‘By making space on its stage for ongoing acknowledgements of the rupture it participates in – the rupture between nature and culture, forests and books, sincere acting and real fish – the theatre can become the site of a much-needed ecological consciousness’.

She argues that artists must not, by any means, take nature on as a metaphor, but rather confront its vexed and mutable reality, and our place within it.

The Creative Climate symposium showcased a number of artists who were engaged in just this searing, immediate collision between nature and culture.

In so doing they were not creating ephemeral ‘pieces’ of art or performance, but rather participating in a variety of determinedly interconnected and tirelessly ongoing projects.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is contributing editor for The Ecologist, focussing on change makers. She is also a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College. @curiousvolumes. 

The Bank of England’s approach to climate change runs the risk of leaving action until it is too late, a report by campaign group Positive Money has concluded.

The organisation, which campaigns for a more equitable and sustainable financial system, highlighted the threat that a changing climate presents to profits and stability of the financial sector, either through physical damage from extreme weather, or revaluations caused by technological or policy changes.

Read: Reforming the mandate for a green Bank of England

It also stated that banks and other financial institutions need to shift billions of pounds away from fossil fuels to fill the gap in green investment.

Primary legislation

The group acknowledged that the Bank of England has been active on climate change, with its governor Mark Carney speaking regularly about the issue, and bringing climate change to the attention of the international finance community.

Carney chaired the Financial Stability Board, which created a global task force of experts from the financial sector to develop recommendations on how businesses should report on climate risk to enable investors to make better decisions.

However, it said that the bank only sees the issue through the lens of risk and financial stability, and overlooks the importance to the climate of commercial banks’ power to create new money when they lend.

Excessive credit is allocated to environmentally destructive activity like fossil fuel production, while insufficient lending is provided to low carbon industries, it said.

The main barrier to change is political, as the bank’s mandate is set by parliament, and primary legislation would be needed to amend it, it added.

Radical change

Barry Gardiner MP, speaking at the report’s launch in Westminster, compared the economic threat posed by climate change to that of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Gardiner, who is shadow secretary of state for international trade, and shadow minister for energy and climate change, said: “The economic crisis of climate change is markedly different to the recession, in that we’ve seen it coming for some time.”

The UK must redesign its financial systems to tackle climate change, just the same as it did after the financial crisis, when major changes were made such as stress testing banks and raising the requirements for how much capital banks needed to keep in reserve, he said.

He praised Carney for bringing climate change to the fore in the financial sector, but said that the bank needed to make deeper changes to accelerate action on climate change, such as changing its criteria for buying bonds, which were currently skewed towards higher carbon sectors, and publishing the climate risk to its own assets, he said.

“The Bank of England’s mandate is to protect and enhance the stability of the financial systems of this country. If climate change poses a systemic risk to our finances, then it’s surely in its remit to look at climate change,” Gardiner said.

“In the face of the banking crisis, public institutions bailed out the banking sector. It’s time to bail out the climate,” he added.  

Compartmentalising climate change

Lord Deben, chair of the government’s climate advisory body the Committee on Climate Change, also spoke at the launch, saying: “The Bank of England should no longer compartmentalise climate change.

“If its governor says it’s true that climate change is perhaps the greatest disruptive force in international finance, then they must do something about it.”

The Bank of England declined to comment on the report. But report author and economist at Positive Money Rob Macquarie said that it had spoken to bank officials and they were “very on the page” on climate risk.

“But there is no way those messages are getting across to the monetary side of the bank,” he said.

Green investment collapse

Meanwhile, MPs on the cross-party Environmental Audit Committee called on ministers to publish a plan to secure the investment needed to meet the UK’s carbon budgets.

A series of government policy changes have led to a “dramatic and worrying collapse” in clean energy investment, the committee’s inquiry on green finance found.

Investment in clean energy fell by 10 percent in 2016, and 56 percent in 2017, leaving it at its lowest since 2008 and threatening the UK’s ability to meet its legal carbon budgets, it said.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and the former deputy editor of the environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

The environmental movement is for the ‘post-industrial’ age what the workers’ movement was for the industrial period.

Yet while strike statistics have been collected for many countries since the late nineteenth century no administrative body tracks the occurrence and frequency of mobilizations or protests related to environmental issues at the global scale, in the way that the International Labour Organization tracks the occurrence of strike action.

Over the past 5 years, a global team of researchers and activists, coordinated by the undersigned, filled this gap by creating the largest existing inventory on ecological struggles from around the world: The Global Atlas of Environmental Justice or EJAtlas. It includes both qualitative and quantitative data on thousands of conflictive projects as well as on the social response.

Environmental conflicts as potent forces for sustainability

In a Special Feature for Sustainability Science, the lenses of political ecology and ecological economics are applied to unpack ‘ecological distribution conflicts’ in 13 articles that explore the why, what, how and who.

Ecological distribution conflicts arise precisely when communities refuse to be polluted, to be contaminated, displaced and erased and decide to mobilize and rise up in social opposition.

We underline the need for a politicization of socio-environmental debates, whereby political refers to the struggle over the kinds of worlds the people want to create and the types of ecologies they want to live in.

We put the focus on who gains and who loses in ecological processes arguing that these issues need to be at the center of sustainability science. Secondly, we demonstrate how environmental justice groups and movements coming out of those conflicts play a fundamental role in redefining and promoting sustainability.

We contend that protests are not disruptions to smooth governance that need to be managed and resolved, but that they express grievances as well as aspirations and demands and in this way may serve as potent forces that can lead to the transformation towards sustainability of our economies, societies and ecologies.

Debunking the fake solutions

While there exists broad consensus about the existence of the sustainability crisis, scholars mostly debate only market-based solutions, technological innovations and top-down policies.

Yet the mainstream techno-managerial solutions proposed tend to overlook relations of power and issues of distribution, and to dismiss or minimize the import of political dissent.

Sustainability discourses often remain stuck in what is called a post-political space: a political formation that forecloses the political, the legitimacy of dissenting voices and positions.

At the same time communities around the world are organizing and coming out to the streets en masse to oppose or problematize the imposition of “development” projects, landfills, mines and even large renewable projects and climate fixes. In many places, they put their lives on the line to do so.

Guide to the Special Feature

The included articles touch on a range of countries and regions and themes:

1. Overview and conceptual framework
2. Transversal articles: worldwide conflicts related to wind energy and hydropower
3. Regions: Andean countries, Central America, ex-Yugoslavia
4. Countries: Venezuela, Sri Lanka and Brazil
5. Single issues in one country: cement kilns in Spain and waste incineration in China
6. Resistance-centered perspective on transformation

A couple of take home messages

Indigenous populations constitute 5% of the global population and 15% of the extremely poor and yet, they are affected in no less than 40% of the cases documented in the atlas.

Further, as Del Bene et al. and Navas et al. demonstrate, the cases where they do figure tend to include greater repression, criminalization and deaths

Beyond the violence, there are also stories that inspire. Numerous cases of projects on hold, stopped or redesigned. Twenty per cent of the projects documented have been stopped altogether.

This hints to the successes and also the difficulties of the environmental justice movements in contributing to improve the sustainability of the economy.

The EJAtlas may be considered a contemporary environmental history from below. As founder-directors and contributors of the project we see our role as chroniclers of a global movement for environmental justice leading to social transformation in process, of a history of struggle that is actively creating new worlds and new possibilities.

These Authors

Leah Temper, Federico Demaria, Arnim Scheidel, Daniela Del Bene, Joan Martinez-Alier work with the Environmental Justice Atlas. The full overview article is available online.

We as consumers and citizens take for granted that companies using wood and paper can proudly claim to be using material from Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) certified forests, saying they meet higher standards than non-FSC timber.

Most of us accept that claims of ‘no artificial flavourings and additives’ show superior quality compared to other food. We accept that there are clear advantages with plastic that is labelled that it can be recycled compared to packaging that can’t. We believe that companies using 100 percent renewable power have green credentials worth boasting about. 

Indeed, providing accurate information about differences in quality and often system of production, is generally seen as crucial to the fair and open operation of markets, and in allowing us to make well-informed choices about what we buy and how we spend our money. Not so with our largest manufacturing industry: food and farming.

Championing quality agriculture

Of the £3 billion of EU money that currently goes to UK farming, £2 billion may disappear over the next few years. That money is currently paid to farmers on the basis of how big their farm is, and the government has said that will end after we leave the EU.

Not surprising then that farmers, farming organisations and Michael Gove, the secretary of state at the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), have focused most of their attention on what else that money might be spent on. All are desperate to stop it falling into the hands of the Treasury, or indeed fulfilling the promise on the Brexiteers’ bus, that it would go to the NHS.

The resulting discussion about what sort of farming policy we should have in England after we leave the EU has focused on the importance of high quality.

This is also not surprising, as without automatic EU subsidies, paid whatever farmers produce from the land, there is no way English farming can compete on a world market on the basis of price.

We have some of the most expensive farmland in the world, and, although jobs in farming are not well paid, labour costs are higher than in many other countries that produce the food which could end up being exported to the UK.

Organic matters

The Westminster government’s welcomed emphasis on future farming policy having the goal of high quality, high animal welfare, and high environmental standards, brings England into line with Scotland, which has consistently championed the green, high quality image of Scottish agriculture and its exports – particularly whisky!

It is also a dramatic change – only a couple of years ago Defra was solemnly declaring that there were no differences in animal welfare between industrial farming, where pigs and chickens can still live inside dark sheds or concrete boxes for the whole of their lives, or some dairy cows never get to graze outside, and systems like free range, RSPCA Assured and organic (which is always free range and with, for example, stricter limits on flock sizes for poultry and later weaning for piglets).  

This new, sensible emphasis on quality has, largely unremarked, turned upside down a basic plank of UK farming and food policy, in place for at least the last 70 years.

For all that time the standard mantra from farmers has been that the industry must avoid ‘gold plating’. There has been a consistent, deeply held and vigorously pursued argument that all food produced by the UK is the same standard.

Indeed, organic farmers are often attacked by their non-organic counterparts for saying that organic food is produced with higher animal welfare standards than non-organic, and contains more beneficial nutrients than non-organic crops, dairy and meat, even though the scientific evidence to support these views is perfectly clear cut.

Revolutionise farmers’ prospects

Indeed, some farmers and supermarkets still cling desperately the idea that how food is produced does not affect the quality of life of farm animals and the quality of food on our plates.  

The quantity of toxic pesticides sprayed on crops, whether animals can live outdoors or are indoors their entire lives, whether pigs are kept alive by the heavy use of antibiotics or manage to live happily with no or minimal antibiotic use, whether animals have their tails cut off or their teeth ground down – all of these factors apparently made no difference.

The move from the toxic idea of ‘gold plating’ to the positive idea of ‘gold standards’ in farming will revolutionise the prospects for farmers working to higher standards, like LEAF (better for wildlife), RSPCA assured and organic – and, crucially, for those thinking of making a similar move.

We will be free to talk about differences in standards and quality in farming, just as they do in other industries. Organic farmers and food businesses explaining what makes organic different, and worth paying for, is much the same as someone selling an electric car explaining the environmental and health benefits of the vehicle compared to a diesel or petrol engine.

Explaining the factual differences is not ‘demonising’ the alternatives. And although some farmers claim it is, they can also be quick to knock imported food, and claim superior quality for British produce (labelled with the Red Tractor and Union Jack logo).

Greater transparency

Organic farming and food has higher standards in a range of areas, and more British consumers are appreciating this, with UK sales of organic food growing steadily – at six percent last year. 

Aside from anything else, this presents a real opportunity for farmers – to meet more of this demand for organic food from home-grown organic produce.  

There’s a similar picture with crops used for animal feed, with a new Soil Association report finding that the area of organic arable crops produced in the UK could easily double. 

Financial comparisons show that usually organic farms are more profitable than equivalent non-organic farms, so organic farming provides a real opportunity for British farmers.

Meanwhile, everyone buying food should welcome the move to open, accurate information about what they buy, and farmers should welcome the opportunity to work together while acknowledging that different production systems do affect the quality of the food they produce and have different implications for animal welfare and the environment.

This Author

Peter Melchett is policy director of the Soil Association. 

The Whitley Fund for Nature is celebrating a quarter of a century and looks set to successfully continue providing financial assistance to conservationists across the globe. To date, almost £15 million has been awarded to over 197 wildlife pioneers in 80 countries.

No mean feat in a competitive and challenging field not always financially sufficient or fortunate enough to provide long-standing support.

Seen by many as the ‘Green Oscars’, the awards target those working in nature conservation regarded as international advocates for bio diversity. Notable emphasis is on local projects in resource poor areas and funding  is provided for proven grass-roots conservation leaders in developing countries. Emphasis is on people and wildlife working in a mutually beneficial way.

Best in the field

The 2018 recipients of the prestigious prize consist of  six ‘of the best in the field’, from various backgrounds and regions.

Munir Virani’s Kenyan project is saving the region’s threatened vultures who due to negative cultural perceptions are often poisoned. The project aims to reverse this misguided thinking and it’s hoped it will serve as a model for other African countries. 

Peru-based Kerstin Forsberg works to prevent giant manta rays being caught for both local consumption and use in Chinese medicine. Forsberg established Planeta Oceano in 2009 to conserve marine life in the waters surrounding Peru, which (along with Ecuador), is thought to host the largest population of giant manta rays in the world. These ethereal creatures also have a very low productive rate putting them at greater risk of extinction. 

Dominic Bikaba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is ensuring the survival of the Eastern Lowland Gorillas whilst Anjali Chandraraj Watson’s project focuses on the leopard in Sri Lanka-a unique species native to the island but whose habitat is threatened by the country’s expanding tea plantations.

Global reach 

Watson works to ensure these carnivores co exist safely with wildlife enthusiasts as one in five species  in Sri Lanka is unique to the country. Funding received for her  ‘wildlife corridors’, has brought greater protection for the country’s rich biodiversity. 

Based in Bangladesh, the planets most populated country, Shariar Caesar Rahman is saving the giant tortoise, whilst further bringing to attention an area of forest with re-discovered wildlife such as elephants, sun bears and pangolins.

In a place where reptiles who once co-existed with the dinosaurs now face a human induced mass extinction Caesar Rahman is gaining Indigenous tribes’ trust and working with them to maintain ancestral lands.

Olivier Nsengimanam, a trained vet from Rwanda is conserving the crane. In 2014, in the aftermath of genocide, he founded an NGO Wildlife Conservation Association. The crane is a symbol of wealth and longevity and is under threat from wealthy international buyers wanting them as pets. As it’s only one of two species adapted to tree roosting, Olivier is restoring roost sites through community tree planting. 

Passion and devotion

What links the winners is their passion and devotion for and knowledge of their chosen animal. Through the fund they receive holistic support including training, advice on working with the media and raising the fund’s profile. 

Recipients are encouraged to aim high and take calculated risks, all of which is easier when given an effective platform and the wider support of the network, including access to former winners. 

Interviewing passionate people is always uplifting and the winners are an inspiration. What also makes the organisation particularly effective is its ability to communicate its message and encourage awardees to foster good relations with the media.

They’re doing crucial work at at a critical time and providing success stories in an area normally associated with despair and pessimism.

Cash for conservation

The annual £40,000 prize offers much needed finance for important projects. A rich conservationist is a rare species.

Pablo Garcia Borboroglu is known as the ‘Penguin Man’. Astute and well versed in the art of public relations he has years of experience engaging audiences and gaining support for his conservation efforts. 

A Whitleys alumni, he was awarded the annual Gold Prize for establishing  the world’s first coalition for the protection of penguins.

Faced with threats from sea and land, the birds are often overlooked and anthropomorphised. Borboroglu worked with the International Union for Conservation of Nature to highlight how half the world’s 18 species of penguin are categorised as either vulnerable or endangered .

Learning from the best

Being a mentor to other winners is part of the remit, so it’s heartening to hear tales of Borboroglu meeting his own – the late Luc Hoffman, co-founder of  WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature).

Borboroglu learned from Hoffman how to address threats via large scale action including strengthening international protection whilst encompassing local guardianship schemes. He brought together 125 organisations which ultimately benefited 1.2 million penguins in four continents..

For a seemingly traditional organisation they turn out remarkable activists and thanks to the support and involvement of such high profile patrons such as HRH Princess Anne and Sir David Attenborough, the Whitleys continue to be revered worldwide.

Over the past 25 years, 50,000 species have benefited from better protection and management, and 16 sustainable development goals, and 354 policies have been developed to improve environmental protection at national, regional or international level.

Founder Edward Whitley, a successful author, financier, environmentalist and philanthropist, showed great commitment and foresight which is now paying dividends.

But demand for funding continues. Wildlife needs winners and the latest recipients show how justice can be brought for both man and beast if the will and means are there.

This Author

Wendy Rosie Scott is an anthropologist and journalist focusing on fashion, festivals and creative communities – looking at lifestyle trends and the natural world, as positive partnerships.