Mining expansion is met with huge public opposition all over the world, from mega-mining expansion in Latin America to plans for lithium mining in the Spanish city of Cáceres.

In Northern Ireland there is currently a flurry of mining activity and resistance to it: five companies currently hold 10 mineral prospecting licences for different location across the small country. Four companies have lodged applications for six mining licences.

We take a closer look at three cases where local communities are organising themselves to protect the beauty spots being scoped out by mining companies.

Slieve Gallion

Local residents and nature lovers are sounding the alarm over the potential threat to the much-loved Slieve Gallion mountain in Northern Ireland’s County Derry. Slieve Gallion is part of the famous Sperrin mountain range and is recognised as an area of outstanding natural beauty.

Walkabout Resources Ltd – a mining company based in Western Australia – has a ‘joint venture agreement’ with Koza UK – the British subsidiary of a Turkish gold mining firm – which holds a mineral prospecting licence (MPL) – meaning they can explore the area for minerals. The company revealed in June that they had discovered cobalt-silver in the Slieve Gallion area.

Walkabout Resources has now sought the help of Blytheweigh, a London-based PR company, to help them engage with the local community. In an email, the firm has informed local councillors that it plans to hold a special meeting in order to answer their questions.

Members of the local community are extremely worried about the impact mining at Slieve Gallion would have on the environment. They are raising awareness about the plans to prospect for minerals in Slieve Gallion and they have started a petition to gather support.

There are also plans to organise a public meeting. More information can be found on the Facebook page ‘Factfinding Slieve Gallion’. Early warnings about this conflict go back at least three years, as was reported in The Ecologist back in 2015.

Greencastle

Just 20km away, another global firm – the Canadian company Dalradian – is seeking planning permission to develop a gold mine in the Greencastle area of County Tyrone.

Prospective drilling has already begun and the Cooperate Against Mining In Omagh (CAMIO) group has raised its concerns about investigative drilling that has been taking place just 360m from the Glencordial reservoir, crucial for supplying water to over 21,000 people in the nearby town of Omagh.

The operation – which local people first became aware of on 1 July – involves ‘gold cyanidation’, a controversial process of using sodium cyanide to dissolve gold that can lead to water and soil contamination.

In a statement the group said they fear that the use of sodium cyanide could result in “permanent damage to our water supply”.

Locals have been campaigning against Dalradian’s presence in the area since 2016.

There have been several cyanide-related disasters in the EU with the worst to date at a gold mine in Baia Mare (Romania) in 2000 when 100,000 cubic metres of cyanide-rich waste was leaked into the surrounding waterways cutting off drinking water supplies for 2.5 million people in neighbouring Hungary and Serbia. Hundreds of tonnes of fish were killed in the Szamos-Tisza-Danube River system.

Gold cyanidation is regulated by EU rules on industrial processes and water protection. But a call from the European Parliament in 2010 for proposals for a law that would see a general ban on cyanide in mining in the EU has not yet been followed up by the European Commission. Following protests from activists and local communities, in Greece, the Supreme Court banned the use of cyanide in mining due to its expected devastating impact.

A spokesperson from CAMIO said:

We as a group are implacably opposed to mining in the Sperrins. With calculated cool, calm deliberation CAMIO will challenge Dalradian and any other mining company who come here intending to mine. We will do this using every means available; in the courts, in the political arena, in the financial, agriculture, mining, arts and health sectors simultaneously with outrageous activism on the ground, in the air and on social media. Through education in our local communities, schools, colleges and churches we will build a powerful and effective collaboration of social networks here and abroad of community organisations and institutions to resist mining in this area.

Ring of Gullion

Last year Conroy Gold lodged an application for prospecting licences to hunt for gold in areas of South Armagh, in the Ring of Gullion area – despite the fact that the area has been protected by EU nature laws since 2000 when it was designated a ‘Special Area of Conservation’ as part of the EU-wide ‘Natura 2000’ network of protected areas.

Natura 2000 areas are designated under EU nature protection laws to ensure the long-term survival of Europe’s most valuable and threatened species and habitats. Nature-damaging activities such as mining are supposed to be heavily restricted on these sites.

The Ring of Gullion has also been declared a Site of Special Scientific Interest under the British government’s conservation scheme as a result of its unique geology and biodiversity.

The ‘Save Our South Armagh’ campaign group said that during a public consultation on the application for the licences there was a “lack of information made available to the public” which they say was a direct contravention of the Aarhus Convention Agreement of 2001 which “specifically guarantees the rights of access to information and public participation in decision-making”.

This Author

Emily Macintosh works as a Communications Officer at the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). Her stories deal mostly with farming, nature, slow fashion and sustainability. This article was first published at metamag.

What we eat has a huge impact on climate change and the natural environment. The global animal farming industry creates more greenhouse gas emissions than the whole transport sector combined and is responsible for up to 91 percent of Amazon degradation.

World population is growing, but even if it stayed the same, it is estimated that if everyone adopted a Western diet, we would need four planets the size of Earth to sustain ourselves. On the other hand, a producing food for a vegan diet requires about a third of the land and a third of the water than for an animal-based diet. This is because farmed animals eat much more protein than they produce. 

The United Nations have urged for a global shift towards a vegan diet to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty and the worst impacts of climate change. Even Greenpeace – historically cautious around the topic of veganism – is now calling for the global meat and dairy production and consumption to be cut in half by 2050.

Bizarre situation

Environmental issues are a broad and complicated topic, especially for those with no interest in science. Most people don’t enjoy listening to statistics, but one here and there can go a long way.

The main arguments in favour of vegan diets are that eating animals is inefficient, wasteful and, in 2018, completely unnecessary.

We find ourselves in the bizarre situation where for every 100 calories we feed to animals, we only receive 12 calories back from their flesh and milk. By eating those crops directly, we could feed billions more people around the globe.

Another popular statistic is that the global livestock industry generates as much greenhouse gas emissions as all transport combined. All those transatlantic flights, short hops across the channel, long commutes and school runs, are outweighed by the ‘meat and two veg’ approach most people take to meal times.

This is exacerbated by the fact that animal agriculture is the world’s biggest producer of methane, a far more powerful greenhouse gas than the much maligned CO2.

Sustainable meat-eating?

Ultimately, animal agriculture can never be sustainable because of the amount of food and water the animals consume, the required space to rear them, and the amount of waste they produce throughout their lives. It’s easier just to eat plants!

Shopping locally and seasonally is important, but it pales in comparison to the impact you can have by changing what you eat.

The Oxford Martin Programme on the Future of Food looked into what would happen if the world went vegan by 2050. There would be up to eight million human lives saved, greenhouse gas emissions reduced by two thirds, and healthcare-related savings and avoided climate damages of $1.5 trillion.

Recent research carried out for The Vegan Society showed that only a fifth of those surveyed had made the link between animal agriculture and climate change, even though 95 percent of them reported that they did at least one thing a week to help the environment.

However, a growing movement is making the link between diet and climate change. There are now 600,000 vegans in the UK, twice as many as two years ago, and we want many more people – particularly those already committed to being more environmentally aware in other aspects of their lives – to join us.

‘Plate Up’

Last year, The Vegan Society launched its biggest campaign to date – Plate Up for the Planet. We challenged people to try a vegan diet for seven days to see what the impact would be on their carbon footprint. The results were astounding.

Over 10,000 people took the challenge, saving the same amount of carbon dioxide as flying to the moon and back. Out of those surveyed, 44 percent said they will definitely continue on a vegan diet and 83 percent said they will reduce the amount of meat and dairy they consume.

This Author

Dominika Piasecka is media and PR officer at The Vegan Society, and a keen vegan activist. If you would like to learn more about veganism, sign up to the seven-day challenge here.

His parachute was engulfed in flames. Antony Fisher and his younger brother Basil were engaged in a fierce firefight over the rolling hills of Sussex on 15 August 1940 after a crack Nazi squadron launched a surprise bombardment of their airbase during a decisive day in the Battle of Britain.

“Things looked very stern, with the odds against us,” Anthony Eden, the Minister for War, wrote that very evening after having met with Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the War Office. “[T]his was to be one of the critical days of the war.”

Read the full FAKENOMICS series now!

Adolf Hitler had launched every single plane in his Luftwaffe to attack England’s Royal Air Force and deliver what he hoped would be decisive blow to the country’s defences before launching a ground assault and occupation. 

Shortly after 7pm the Nazis’ fiercest squadron attacked the Croydon airbase where Antony and Basil were stationed. 

The brothers scrambled to defend their base. The RAF 111 Squadron replied with a daring ambush and forced the enemy into a panicked retreat towards the Channel. Basil pursued the fleeing fighters.

But he soon became entangled in a fierce dogfight over the Sussex countryside. Gunfire tore through Basil’s plane and he was forced to eject from the cockpit. 

Violent Aggression

Antony could see that flames had engulfed the silk canapé of his brothers parachute and burnt through its harness. He watched helplessly as the 23-year-old dropped through the sky like a sack of coal. 

The stricken plane crashed into a farmhouse barn and exploded. That evening, Basil’s body was retrieved from a pond near Sidleham, Sussex, not far from his idyllic childhood home at Ashdown Park.

“I survived,” Antony would reflect. “But no thanks to my own efforts. For it was some time before I was to learn that the main ability for which I and my squadron existed, to destroy enemy aircraft, I did not possess. Unaware of my inability, and maybe with less than average inclination for violent aggression, I was no credit in that particular occupation.” 

The landed aristocrat would reach profound conclusions from his own experience of war. “Mankind is in much the same position as I was as an ignorant fighter pilot and in worse danger for being unaware of the need to correct that ignorance,” he mused. The lesson for Antony was painfully clear. 

The cause of his tragedy had been his caution. If he had demonstrated Basil’s self-assured bravery his brother may have been saved. Perhaps he could have shot down the Nazi aggressor. 

Antony never flew again and served out the rest of the war inventing a training machine to improve the aim of Britain’s airmen. 

Attacking Science

He also set about reading, trying to fully understand the political, economic and philosophical divides that had resulted in war and his brother’s death. 

This was the beginning of a tireless, lifelong campaign to wake humanity from its ignorant slumber, and prevent the slow march towards tyranny and war. 

The rest of his life was like his war years: beyond extraordinary. The decisions he took, the ideas he promoted, and the men he allied with would change the course of history.

The machinery of government had created the worst loss of life in human history as the British Empire and the German Wehrmacht pounded each other almost to extinction.

Antony was a deeply sensitive, intelligent man. His devout religious upbringing and the profound grief that characterised his early childhood meant that he was determined to understand the true cause of the Second World War, from the Wall Street crash of 1929 to the rise of “National Socialism” in Germany under Hitler.

An Exotic and Varied Life

And as an Eton and Cambridge educated chap, Antony turned to the field of economics. Antony devoured Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’s Capital. “Ideas have consequences”, he repeated often.

The ideas that Antony found in those books were reverberating down through the ages and still have profound implications for our own economic and ecological predicament.

Antony’s life was in every detail extraordinary. His long years were filled with the unprecedented privileges of his century while he also suffered from the devastation and grief that scarred the age.

Indeed, he seems more a fictional character devised to tell the story of Britain’s history, power and ideology.

His friend and disciple, the late John Blundell, once remarked that Antony led “the kind of exotic and varied life normally found only in the pages of thick paperback novels stacked high at airports.”

My own sense is that his life was more Shakespearian in scope: defined by comedic tragedy while offering a richness and complexity in its lessons about our own age and the political reality of our time.

Antony founded Britain’s first think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), and dedicated his later years to establishing a complex network of similar free market institutions in the United States.

These erstwhile quasi-academic hothouses would provide the “beliefs” that underpinned Thatcherism in Britain and Reaganism in America years later – and then today Trumpism and Brexit.

Andrew Marr, in his BBC political history would describe the IEA as “undoubtedly the most influential think tank in modern British history.”

Fighting Tyranny

These institutions would also, as I will show, prove instrumental in germinating climate denial in the United States and then cross pollinating it to Britain.

Antony would dedicate his life to fighting tyranny, real and imagined, in a mostly honest and well meant campaign to liberate the individual from the obligations of the State and society. 

Margaret Thatcher, some years after serving as Prime minister, would reflect: “Yes, it started with ideas, with beliefs. That’s it. You must start with beliefs. Yes, always with beliefs.”

Today there is considerable reflection among climate change policy advocates as they try to comprehend how a small yet influential community of deniers could threaten political attempts to prevent catastrophic global warming.

There is irrefutable evidence that ExxonMobil and other oil interests have funded think tanks and individuals determined to attack science and scientists. But could it really be the case that conscious, intelligent men and women would take the devil’s silver? 

Even when their actions could seriously jeopardize the well-being of their children and their entire world? 

Neoliberalism is Ideology

Others have asked what role ideology plays in people’s “scepticism” of climate change science. Thatcher when discussing beliefs was referring to the work of Antony Fisher and his Institute of Economic Affairs. 

And she was speaking about the IEA’s relentless promulgation of the ideas of the once obscure and forgotten economist Friedrich von Hayek. Hayek had in turn tirelessly promoted a then new school in economics, neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism is an ideology. And it is an ideology that says that unless we submit to the “invisible hand” of the free market we shall cause totalitarianism and want on a global scale. 

Ideology can be described as a coherent belief system, that takes on our almost unconscious assumptions about economics, about values systems, about right and wrong.

When you research climate denial you quickly establish that almost everyone involved in its inception and promulgation is a fervent believer in the once fringe ideology of neoliberalism. 

‘Climate change regulations, like any regulations, distort and pervert the free market. The best intentions of environmentalists can lead to the hell of state control.’

This is what they believe. And beliefs are usually based on our experiences, rather than on peer-reviewed scientific journals or sophisticated experimentation.

The War of Ideas

This is the history of climate denial. It is the first comprehensive telling of this story from its very origins in the ideological “battle of ideas” for neoliberalism and against “reformist” Keynesianism and the more incendiary, revolutionary communism. 

This “first rough draft” is based on hundreds of interviews, including long and fascinating conversations with the deniers themselves. And it begins with the horrific shock and grief suffered by the young Antony at the height of the Second World War.

There is much to learn from Antony’s life and ideas. These ideas, as I will show during the course of this series, would prove to be the curious cause of climate scepticism.

This remarkable story provides the absolutely vital clues we need to understand how senior statesmen, politicians of integrity and intellect, scientists and sensible people can come to question something as fundamental as climate change. 

And this story unlocks the secret of how we who accept the science and its consequence can still hope to secure a prosperous and happy future for generations to come.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This series first appeared at Desmog.uk.