Almost a hundred years ago the organic farming movement threw down the gauntlet and challenged industrial agriculture. Sir Albert Howard, his first wife, Gabrielle, and, following her death, his second wife, Louise, were the brave pioneers of this movement.

The Howards were a new breed. They merged the latest science with the ideals of peasant farming. Albert and Gabrielle fell deeply in love at the turn of the 20th century and forged a working relationship remarkable in the annals of science history. Side by side in the laboratory they united deeply held traditional values about Nature with the hard, cold facts of science.

By the 1980s, long after the Howards had died, the movement had gained public acceptance from many of the same corporations and government institutions that had called Albert Howard and his followers cranks and kooks.

The myriad of followers hailed from both left and right of the political spectrum, attracting the support of green activists, neo-traditionalists, socialists, fascists and capitalists. High-profile luminaries, from Gandhi to the Prince of Wales, along with millions of consumers, have been counted as faithful adherents of organic farming. How did this come about?

The making of a manifesto

In 1905 the government of India hired Albert and, soon after, Gabrielle as economic botanists. They worked in a new India-wide agricultural research station in Pusa, Bihar and developed new varieties of wheat. But they also attempted to solve India’s largest agricultural problem: how could small farmers who could not afford expensive chemical fertilisers and pesticides improve production and stave off plant disease using natural methods they could afford?

After gaining his own research centre in Indore, Albert devised a new scientific method of drawing nitrogen from the atmosphere through the natural bacteria in a compost pile.

Treating the soil with this compost rejuvenated the humus and enabled the roots of the plants to absorb vital nutrients. All this was accomplished using commonly available plant material and only a small amount of manure as starter.

When Gabrielle tragically died of cancer in 1930, Albert retired to England, heartbroken. Gabrielle’s sister Louise had just retired as an agricultural adviser for the League of Nations in Geneva, and she met often with Albert to handle family affairs.

After lengthy discussions on agriculture, they both soon realised that what worked in India could work for the whole world. They met again for a holiday in Italy to work together on a new book titled The Waste Products of Agriculture.

They fell in love, and married a few years after Gabrielle’s death. Louise helped Albert fashion his vision for agricultural reform into a powerful and popular book called An Agricultural Testament, published in 1940. It quickly became the manifesto of the organic farming movement.

After Albert died in 1947, Louise carried on the battle for the health of the soil through her own herculean efforts. Along with the Soil Association and a host of other advocates like E.F. Schumacher, organic farming activists were a vital bridge between the earlier conservation movement and the modern environmental movement that arose after 1970.

Louise Howard, largely unknown today, sustained a global network of organic farming activists who also advocated clean air and water, the protection of wildlife, and the urgent necessity of cutting back on deadly chemicals like DDT that poisoned our ecosystem.

Her vital role in keeping these issues alive from the late 1940s to the late 1960s places her as arguably the single most important woman in the environmental movement. Even Rachel Carson drew largely from organic farming material that activists secretly provided to her for writing her seminal book, Silent Spring.

Connecting heart and science

Little could Louise know at the time of her death in 1969 that the incremental efforts of gardeners, small farmers and small markets would, over the next few decades, reach a tipping point and swiftly convert not just millions of people, but also numerous governments and international organisations to the ideas of her late husband.

She would have been surprised that authorities would from 1980 onwards transform the reach of organic farming so radically and bring the movement she once led in exile into a global system of agricultural management. Nor could she have foreseen that the accumulation of market forces would finally, through large corporate enterprises, produce organic farming on a monumental scale.

What does the future hold? First, the environmental need for organic farming is likely to drive its expansion in the future. Industrial agriculture takes a toll on water catchment areas. Wildlife and human health can suffer from the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Industrial agriculture does not sequester carbon in soils as well as organic farming does, and this has implications for global warming.

The lessons from this science of the heart are many. The most important is that in order to have impact, science must connect with deeply held values. Today the public is divided over how far to push environmental protections.

Often these debates suffer because the science behind them does not connect with people at the local level, or they present only scientific modelling that is overly abstract and disconnected from spirituality.

The Howards understood how to connect science with the heart. Albert Howard attempted to modernise the values of peasant farmers who felt a profound connection to the land and who handed down traditions of husbandry from generations of peasant farmers in Europe, India and China.

Peasant farmers provided examples of how humans could sustain agriculture on the same plot of land for thousands of years without exhausting the soil. The Howards wanted to place modern agriculture on the same footing.

They successfully modernised and systematised ecological values into the modern farm economy and blazed a path for the future that revealed how science, ecology and tradition can thrive together.

Author

Gregory Barton is Professor of History at Western Sydney University. His latest book, The Global History of Organic Farming, is published by Oxford University Press.

This article was first published in the current issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is available now. 

With a blade, I flicked the mussels off the rocks into my waiting bucket. Purple-shelled, they lay on a bed of sea lettuce and samphire. Later, cooked together in white wine and cream, my seaside discoveries created a marine feast. This was food at its best – fresh, seasonal, packaging-free, and utterly delicious.

If you enjoy food and love to spend time outdoors, then foraging soon becomes a way of life. You see the world differently – pretty elder­flowers bursting into creamy bud are still charming, but you will scrutinise them to pinpoint that perfect moment when the buds unfurl, ready to harvest for your fragrant cordial.

A simple walk becomes an opportunity to gather. Recently, a woodland stroll saw us returning with a few handfuls of ramsons, or wild garlic, which I crushed into butter with a little salt, smeared onto ciabatta and baked, to make wild garlic bread. I’m quietly awaiting the blackberries, hazelnuts and chestnuts.

Knowledge is everything

Foraging connects you deeply to Nature. After all, taste is the most intimate of our senses. When a wrong choice could kill you or make you unwell, suddenly knowledge is everything. You will check and check again that your identification is correct, and on seeking the advice of an expert, learn more than you ever set out to. Even today, I am wary of most mushroom types unless I am accompanied by a more experienced gatherer.

Safety is about more than accidentally eating something poisonous. It’s advisable to avoid dog height (!), to pick well away from traffic fumes, and to check your skin and clothing for ticks if you’ve been walking through undergrowth.

The foraging guides online by the Woodland Trust are very accessible for beginners. Richard Mabey’s Food for Free in pocket size is a worthwhile field companion whatever your level of experience.

We spend years training children out of their innate desire to taste the world around them. My own two ate books, mud and insects if my back was turned for two seconds. Yet when children are old enough to understand safety, they take to foraging with relish. Expert little fingers will pluck the petals from deadnettles, sucking the sweet nectar found there, or pick the tiny wild strawberries that are practically invisible from adult height.

Foraging is the antithesis of supermarket shopping, where everything is always available whatever the weather or time of year. Sometimes you will return empty-handed from a foray. It also comes with the responsibility that we can easily absolve ourselves of when in a shop.

Take what you need

A good forager will never trespass and will always leave plenty for next time and for Nature. If you dig up plants, they will be killed, whereas if you just snip off a few leaves from each, the plant will continue to grow. Similarly, whilst I want plenty of blackberries for my crumble, I will always leave plenty for the creatures who depend on them for their survival.

When I don my rubber gloves and pick young nettles, I am conscious that I am stepping outside the norms of society – I do look slightly mad by modern standards. However, foraging was once not only normal, but vital.

After all, for a vast stretch of human history, we survived by foraging for wild plants and animals. Even when agriculture became widespread, many people still depended on hedgerow and field edge for food and for medicinal plants such as yarrow and elderflower (which were often combined with peppermint to break a fever).

Today, fewer of us in the western world need to forage to prevent starvation, yet when we do we are feeding not only our bellies, but also our knowledge and that deep, forgotten part of ourselves that is animal and truly part of Nature.

Puffball mushroom pizza

The giant puffball mushroom is a white globe that can grow as big as your head, with a tasty, earthy flavour and firm texture.

This magnificent and entertaining fungus is also the safest way to introduce some wild mushroom into your diet because it is so easy to identify. Look out for them on grassy meadows and field edges. Just check that your mushroom is bigger than a grapefruit, and – cut from bottom to top – is pure white throughout. Look on www.wildfooduk.com for useful images and descriptions.

The puffball is very versatile and can be used like any mushroom: stir-fried, cooked in garlic butter, baked or grilled… My favourite way is as a very healthy pizza base, making this a low-carb and gluten-free way to enjoy pizza.

Recipe and method

Customise with your own favourite toppings, but here is a basic puffball Margherita. Serves 4.

Ingredients

a giant puffball

1 medium-sized onion, finely chopped

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

Salt and pepper

400g tin chopped tomatoes

2 tbsp tomato purée

pinch of sugar

1 ball of mozzarella, shredded

1 tsp dried oregano

1 tbsp olive oil for the sauce – more will be needed for brushing the puffball slices

Heat a saucepan over a medium heat and add the oil. Once hot, add the onion and a pinch of salt and fry for 4–5 minutes until softened. Add the garlic and cook for a further 2 minutes.

Pour in the tomatoes and tomato purée and season with pepper, more salt if needed, the oregano and a pinch of sugar. Reduce the heat and simmer gently for 20–30 minutes until the sauce has thickened to a jam-like consistency.

Next, slice your puffball into discs about 2cm thick. Each of these is a pizza base.

Heat the grill to hot. Brush oil on both sides of the puffball slices, season with salt and pepper and grill for 2–3 minutes on each side until soft.

Now top with the tomato sauce and mozzarella (and any other toppings you fancy). Grill until the cheese is melted and bubbling, which should take another 2–3 minutes.

Author

Kate Blincoe is a freelance writer. The recipe is an edited entry from her book The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Parenting (Green Books, 2015). 

This article was first published in the current issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, which is available now.

Encouraging farmers to change from keeping cattle on conventional agriculturally improved pasture to grazing them on species-rich grassland could help save Britain’s meadows.

According to new research for the Save Our Magnificent Meadows campaign, the nutritional benefits of feeding cattle on wild-flower meadows could far outweigh those of feeding on conventional pasture, Trevor Dines from Plantlife, one of the organisations involved in the campaign, told Resurgence & Ecologist.

Creating consumer demand for cattle fed this way would make it more financially viable for farmers to manage wild-flower meadows, and so protect them, Dines said.

More than 97 percent of wildflower meadows have disappeared in Britain since the 1930s, and this has in turn affected valuable insect populations.

Need for balance

With so few wild-flower meadows still around, people have lost touch with what it’s like to experience one, Dines said. “Sitting in a meadow, picking buttercups – that has disappeared from our landscapes,” he continued. “There’s nowhere else that’s as thrilling as a wild-flower meadow.”

To encourage interest in preserving wild-flower meadows, Plantlife organises the annual National Meadows Day, being held this year on 7 July. There will be bug hunts, butterfly identification, and the chance to run through a meadow “all senses firing”, as Dines puts it.

In the past, traditional meadows were allowed to grow from January to the beginning of August and were then cut for hay. This was followed by bare-field grazing livestock in September and October. Today’s highly managed farming techniques – silage fields are harvested two or three times a year – do not allow enough time for wild flowers to grow.

“Meadows get overlooked in the rewilding debate,” Dines said. “We’ve got fixations with woodland, but we need more balance because they do different things for different species.”

This Author

Marianne Brown is Deputy Editor of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. She tweets at @brownmariannes. This article first appeared in the latest issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Friedrich von Hayek had abandoned his early socialism in favour of neoliberal free market ideas. But the fashionable theory at the time sat somewhere between the two. John Maynard Keynes had apparently devised a historic compromise between the markets and full scale socialism.

Keynes argued that the government should use its economic powers to manage the markets. This included government lending and spending to promote growth, and encouraging housewives to spend their savings. 

The Cambridge professor attained his prestige and influence because his prescriptions had survived academic scrutiny and practical application during the wars.

Burst out laughing

Hayek had an almost impossible task. He had to devise an economic counter-argument to Keynes, and to expose any logical inconsistency in his analysis and works. 

The “war of ideas” would have global economic consequences. And the Marxists, Fabians and Keynesians who dominated both Cambridge and the London School of Economics (LSE) were not going to make it easy.

Nicholas Kaldor, a disciple of Keynes at the LSE, took delight from in humiliating his intellectual counterpart.

He recalled one spat: “I said, ‘Professor Hayek, this is intermediate economics,’ and Hayek got redder and redder. And afterwards, in the tea room, Hayek came in and said, ‘You know what Kaldor said, what Nicky said? He said: “Professor Hayek, this is intermediate economics and you ought to know it.” I said ‘I protest. I never said that you ought to know it!’ Everyone burst out laughing.”

The paradox

One typical seminar given by Hayek at the LSE was described as “possibly the most aggressively vocal gathering in all economic history. It was extensively and imaginatively devoted to telling Hayek why he was wrong.” But Hayek was about to challenge the dominance of Keynes himself.  

His boss Professor Lionel Robbins translated and published “The Paradox” in Economica, the LSE house journal, and in August of that year he printed Hayek’s full frontal attack on Keynes’s latest work, A Treatise on Money.

“It is a hallmark of Hayek’s sublime confidence, tinged perhaps with the fearlessness that can accompany ignorance, that he was willing to take on Keynes in Keynes’s home territory,”, notes Nicholas Wapshott, the author of Keynes / Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics.

“Hayek’s harsh review of A Treastise on Money invoked howls of rage from Keynes. The subsequent debate…quickly descended into blunt and often brutal assaults that would long outlive both Keynes and Hayek.”

Keynes was not convinced, nor threatened, by his supposed arch-rival. He described Hayek’s work as “one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read…It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlham”.

Elsewhere, Keynes dismissed Hayek’s thinking as “the wildest farrago of nonsense yet”. After Hayek visited Keynes in Cambridge, the latter noted: “…But what rubbish his theory is – I felt today that even he was beginning to disbelieve it himself.”.

The decisive blow came on 4 February 1936 when Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which was almost universally accepted as showing he was right, and Hayek was wrong. According to his biographer Alan Ebenstein, “Hayek was virtually forgotten as a technical economist.”

A remarkable reversal

Then war was declared. Many of Hayek’s colleagues were in the trenches or working in government administration and soon he was elevated to editor of Economica in place of Robbins. The LSE was evacuated en masse to Cambridge. Keynes, in an act of extraordinary good will, ensured that Hayek was given comfortable rooms at King’s College where he served as master.

Hayek’s war could not have been in starker contrast to that of Antony Fisher. The economist enjoyed a remarkable reversal of fortune during the war. It had elevated him from a ridiculed and marginalised lecturer to one of the three most influential and celebrated economists of the age.

The Austrian was living and working in Britain at the outbreak of hostilities and was refused permission to serve with the armed forces or even as a propagandist with the Ministry of Information, despite his repeated appeals.

“Life in Cambridge during the war years was to me particularly genial,” Hayek would reflect. “Somehow the whole mood and intellectual atmosphere of the country had at once proved extraordinarily attractive to me, and the conditions of a war in which all my sympathies were with the English greatly speeded up the process of becoming thoroughly at home.”

One night in the spring of 1942, Hayek found himself sat with the 59-year-old Keynes next to the limestone balustrade on the roof of the Gothic chapel of King’s College, Cambridge.

Extremism and tyranny

The men had both volunteered for fire duty and were ordered to dispatch any incendiary bombs dropped by the Nazi Luftwaffe dropped on Britain’s historic towns in retaliation for the aAllied attack on medieval Lüubeck in Germany.

“On the whole when we met we stopped talking economics,” Hayek recalled. “So we became personally very good friends.”

The terror of watching Hitler’s “shock and awe” assault invoked in the two men very different conclusions. Keynes was determined to use governments to manage the market to prevent further extremism, while Hayek thought that any such interference would itself lead to tyranny.

“It was while he sat out there at night that he began to wonder about what would happen to his adopted country if and when peace came,” according to John Blundell, who we will meet again later in this story. “Hayek detected a growing sense of, ‘as in war, so in peace’ – namely that the government would own, plan and control everything.”

The unintended consequence was that as his colleagues were drafted to the war effort, Hayek was elevated through the academic hierarchy while also finding time to write a fiery polemic.

Hayek made the extraordinary claim that the socialism he onced celebrated had been the true cause of the rise of Nazism in Germany, and the deadly war that had destroyed Europe and slaughtered tens of millions of people.

Deeply pessimistic

“Few are ready to recognise that the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of those tendencies,” he wrote in a small, red notebook.

The Road to Serfdom set out clearly the case for free market economics. It was a stark presentation of the idea that human societies had simply grown too complex to be managed, that any attempt by government to intervene would lead to cohesion and tyranny, and the organised distribution of goods would centralise power in too few hands.

At it’s heart, this theory was deeply pessimistic and assumed that people would, because of their selfish and greedy nature, abuse power. “Men are, in fact, not likely to give their best for long periods unless their own interests are directly involved,” he warned.

“At least for great numbers some external pressure is needed if they are to give their best. The problem of incentives in this sense is a very real one, both in the sphere of ordinary labour and those in marginal activities.”

He concluded: “Only where we ourselves are responsible for our own interests and free to sacrifice them, has our decision moral value.”

But while Hayek believed in capitalism, red in tooth and claw, he did not advocate markets free of any moral or practical limits. There are vital aspects to his prescriptions that appear to have been missed, or even deliberately erased, by his most staunch supporters today.

First and foremost, Hayek argued that capitalism must respect tradition, honesty and the rule of law. Civilisations not built on these moral limits would ultimately fail, he argued.

He warned against the power of corporate monopolies. “A system in which large privileged groups profit from the gains of monopoly may be politically much more dangerous,” he explained.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Hayek was, at this stage in his thinking, a keen supporter of state-imposed environmental regulations. These are the very same regulations being fought in his name in the acrimonious and sometimes dishonest war against climate science.

Hayek is absolutely clear: “Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.”

Hayek’s book was rejected three times before making it into print, on the grounds that it was “unfit for publication by a reputable house.” Hayek himself expected to sell just a few hundred copies. But then he found himself supported by men of extraordinary wealth and influence. Industrialists who were delighted to find an academic at last championing profits, and identifying them as wealth creators and good men.,

International sensation

Hayek was sailing to America for a small-scale speaking tour when The Road to Serfdom became an overnight international sensation.

“Imagine my surprise,” he wrote on arriving at a speaking engagement. “There was 3,000 people in the hall, plus a few score more in adjoining rooms with load speakers. There I was, with this battery of microphones and a veritable sea of expectant faces.”

The praise for The Road to Serfdom was far from universal. The book could not have been more insulting and personally upsetting to his socialist adversaries. Many had lost friends and family fighting in Spain against fascism during 1936 and in the bloody trenches of the Second World War. The book was widely derided in academic circles as emotional, political and not really about economics at all.

Keynes was also sailing to the United States when he first obtained a copy of The Road to Serfdom was published, en route to take part in the Bretton Woods negotiations to advise on the establishment of government institutions to manage the market.

“The voyage has given me the chance to read your book properly,” he told Hayek in a telegram.

“You will not expect me to accept quite all the economic data in it…I should say that what we want is not no planning, or even less planning, indeed I should say that we almost certainly want more.”

Deficient and authoritarian

Herman Finer, a US academic, best summed up the contemporary opposition to Hayek’s case, and in The Road to Reactionset out to prove that his “apparatus of learning is deficient, his reading incomplete, that his understanding of the economic process is bigoted, his account of history false, that his political science is almost non-existent, his terminology is misleading, his comprehension of British and American political procedure and mentality gravely defective, and that his attitude to average men and women is truculently authoritarian.”

But Hayek’s friends proved more influential. The first edition of 2,000 copies sold out in days and; newspapers and magazines around the world rushed out reviews.; Churchill was “fortified in his apprehensions” about socialism and his Conservative Party desperately sought one-and-a-half tonnes of scarce paper to print further copies in time for the general election.

The book was read by Winston Churchill, and by a young Margaret Thatcher while she was studying chemistry at Oxford University.

Readers’ Digest was decisive in propelling Hayek into the public mind, publishing extracts and also distributing 600,000 copies through its readers’ club. “Hayek became a celebrity, and the work, a symbol,” records Ebenstein.

The magazine was read by millions, including a Battle of Britain veteran determined to take on the tyranny of the state.

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.

All that exists right now is the wolves, the forest and the mystery pulling me deeper and deeper into the primeval forest. I’ve been tracking the wolves for hours. Their profound presence is vivid in their enormous paw prints that lace through the snow.

After many hours I eventually tire, and look for a place to rest. I peer inside a great fallen oak, and find a central cavity so large I can sit upright inside. All along the cavity walls, the long fibres of the decaying tree are coming undone, here shaggy hay-like lumps fall from above, there black shatterings into cuboid charcoal-like shapes.

I find myself spending the whole night inside the tree, holding vigil for the wild. Throughout the night I hear the wolves in the distance, the howling cry of wilderness echoing down through the ages, as if to remind us who we once were; who we could be again. Calling us back into the family.

Agents of regeneration

When I first arrived home from Bialowieza, Europe’s last primeval forest, I was desperate to return, sensing there was so much more depth and mystery to explore in the wildness of the place.

I spent some time on rewilding land near my home in west Wales and decided not to rush back. I realised that though I had left the forest, the forest and its wildness had not left me.

And although there is no ‘true’ wilderness in any of the landscapes I know as home (the roots of the word wild are in willed, as in self-willed) through my time spent on rewilding land, and participation in active rewilding, I have come to realise it is not lost forever.

It is not a pure state which once defiled can never be attained again. Wildness remains dormant in the land – and in us – patiently waiting for her time to come again. And what’s more, we can participate in her return; wilderness does not have to mean the absence of human participation.

Indeed, for wildness to return to our domesticated landscapes we will have to participate in its creation, for we have eliminated all of the key agents of regeneration: wolf, beaver, boar, bear, and others.

Rewilding process

And in this participation lies reciprocal healing, for the land and the human spirit, as I’ve found in the time I’ve spent working on rewilding projects.

Ripping out internal fences was one of the first jobs at Bwlch Corog, a site recently acquired by the Cambrian Wildwood rewilding project in west Wales.

Removing the borders, the boundaries, the containment into sizes and shapes for easy human perception and control, was an exhilarating experience. As we liberated the land, on some level it also felt like we too were somehow being liberated. It felt like a sacred act; an apology, a reconciliation.

Beneath the necessary work of restoring our destroyed landscapes is perhaps this other work that rewilding asks of us: to step back into the family – to participate.

As key agents in the ecosystems we dominate, humans must be part of the rewilding process – we too must be rewilded.

Deep nature

That process includes reconnecting with nature, just as rewilding aims to reconnect core wilderness areas, and reclaiming the ancient spiritual relationship to nature that we have forgotten in recent human times.

And so, an invitation. In August, I will be holding a wild nature immersion retreat at Bwlch Corog. The invitation is to come and rewild yourself, participate in wildness, commune with the wild and discover the wildness that lies dormant within you.

We’ll learn to interpret the language of birds, the body language of trees, and the tracks and signs of wildlife – magical doorways that reveal the ever-unfolding dramas of the natural world around us.

And then, with that unique knowledge, open to the sacred within nature, the divine mystery that lies beneath the surface of all things, and see what awaits for our souls to discover when we commune with the wild…

Imagine herds of wild – and surprisingly friendly! – horses, regenerating landscapes, overnight solos, wild swimming, deep nature connection, and entering a magical realm of animate nature, where rocks and trees and birds can communicate. This world of sacred ecology awaits us – we only need to step through the door that has always been open.

Combining modern science with ancient wisdom, practical ecology and spiritual practise, nature connection and rewilding, it will be a 5-day experiment of re-imagining – or remembering – the world as sacred, animate… wild.   

This Author

Kara Moses is a facilitator of rewilding – landscapes and people – and a freelance writer. She is an associate fellow of St Ethelburga’s. Rewilding Spirituality: Wild Nature Immersion runs from 17-21 August in west Wales. Book before 5th August to guarantee a place. Book here. More stories of Kara’s time in Bialowieza and Bwlch Corog can be found in this essay recently published in Emergence magazine.

School’s out for the summer! What better way to spend a sunny afternoon than by creating your own hedgehog house to help the nation’s favourite mammal from further decline, especially during the current heatwave.

The Hedgehog Street team – run by BHPS and PTES – is urging people to help hedgehogs by providing a safe haven that’s cool, cosy and comfortable during this unusual summer weather.

Hedgehog census

Last year, Hedgehog Street launched the first ever Hedgehog Housing Census, which looked at how, when and why hedgehogs use either homemade or artificial hedgehog houses in gardens across Britain.

Between August and October 2017, over 5,000 people responded to the Hedgehog Housing Census. Now, a year on, the secrets behind what makes a perfect hedgehog home have been revealed. The results, analysed by the University of Reading, show that:

– Hedgehogs prefer homemade houses, but artificial houses are still a good alternative if they have the right features

– Hedgehogs need time to get used to a new house before they use it

– Feeding hedgehogs, putting water in your garden & providing bedding (such as dry leaves, pet straw or both) increases the chances of a resident hedgehog moving in

– Hedgehogs prefer houses found in back gardens, in shaded areas.

– Pets or badgers don’t appear to put off a ‘hog from moving in

Building your own hedgehog home is a fun and easy to do. To download a PDF with simple instructions on how to build two different types of hedgehog house, visit: www.hedgehogstreet.org/housingcensus.

Hedgehog ecology

Interestingly, the results also showed that houses positioned less than five meters to the homeowners’ house are most frequently used, indicating that hedgehogs have become accustomed to human activity.

A total of 81 percent  of those who responded to the questions about usage for daytime resting and hibernation found evidence that their hedgehog house was used for resting during summer daytime, 59 percent noted that it was used for hibernation during winter months and 28% said it was used for breeding.

Emily Wilson, hedgehog officer for Hedgehog Street explained: “Until now we didn’t know what type of hedgehog house was best for hedgehogs and if they were even really used at all, as this area of hedgehog ecology simply hadn’t been studied.

“These results tell us that hedgehog houses are helping ‘hogs find a place to rest, hibernate and even breed. We can use these results to help conserve these animals and give the most accurate advice to anyone wanting to provide shelter for wild hedgehogs through our Hedgehog Street campaign.

“It’s interesting to see that hedgehogs seem to prefer houses that have been in a garden for some time, but we hope that people won’t be disheartened if they have a newer hedgehog house, it just means hedgehogs need a little time to get used to it.

“If hedgehogs are provided with food and water in the garden (especially during this unusually hot weather), and the correct bedding in the house, this really encourages hedgehogs into your area, and they could become regular night-time visitors.”

Hedgehog champions

Abigail Gazzard, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Reading added: “Further analysis is required to investigate why hedgehogs seem to prefer homemade houses to artificial ones.

“This could be to do with the type of materials they are made from, they’re physical size, or whether they have other features such as tunnels and internal partitions, so the next step for us is to look into this aspect specifically.”

Emily concluded: “Thanks to these results analysed by the University of Reading, we now better understand what a hedgehog is looking for in a perfect home, so we hope existing Hedgehog Champions and those who aren’t yet champions, consider encouraging hedgehogs in gardens across Britain by building and introducing your own hedgehog houses.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from PTES. To support PTES’ ongoing conservation work, you can donate £3 by texting ‘PTES18 £3’ to 70070.

School’s out for the summer! What better way to spend a sunny afternoon than by creating your own hedgehog house to help the nation’s favourite mammal from further decline, especially during the current heatwave.

The Hedgehog Street team – run by BHPS and PTES – is urging people to help hedgehogs by providing a safe haven that’s cool, cosy and comfortable during this unusual summer weather.

Hedgehog census

Last year, Hedgehog Street launched the first ever Hedgehog Housing Census, which looked at how, when and why hedgehogs use either homemade or artificial hedgehog houses in gardens across Britain.

Between August and October 2017, over 5,000 people responded to the Hedgehog Housing Census. Now, a year on, the secrets behind what makes a perfect hedgehog home have been revealed. The results, analysed by the University of Reading, show that:

– Hedgehogs prefer homemade houses, but artificial houses are still a good alternative if they have the right features

– Hedgehogs need time to get used to a new house before they use it

– Feeding hedgehogs, putting water in your garden & providing bedding (such as dry leaves, pet straw or both) increases the chances of a resident hedgehog moving in

– Hedgehogs prefer houses found in back gardens, in shaded areas.

– Pets or badgers don’t appear to put off a ‘hog from moving in

Building your own hedgehog home is a fun and easy to do. To download a PDF with simple instructions on how to build two different types of hedgehog house, visit: www.hedgehogstreet.org/housingcensus.

Hedgehog ecology

Interestingly, the results also showed that houses positioned less than five meters to the homeowners’ house are most frequently used, indicating that hedgehogs have become accustomed to human activity.

A total of 81 percent  of those who responded to the questions about usage for daytime resting and hibernation found evidence that their hedgehog house was used for resting during summer daytime, 59 percent noted that it was used for hibernation during winter months and 28% said it was used for breeding.

Emily Wilson, hedgehog officer for Hedgehog Street explained: “Until now we didn’t know what type of hedgehog house was best for hedgehogs and if they were even really used at all, as this area of hedgehog ecology simply hadn’t been studied.

“These results tell us that hedgehog houses are helping ‘hogs find a place to rest, hibernate and even breed. We can use these results to help conserve these animals and give the most accurate advice to anyone wanting to provide shelter for wild hedgehogs through our Hedgehog Street campaign.

“It’s interesting to see that hedgehogs seem to prefer houses that have been in a garden for some time, but we hope that people won’t be disheartened if they have a newer hedgehog house, it just means hedgehogs need a little time to get used to it.

“If hedgehogs are provided with food and water in the garden (especially during this unusually hot weather), and the correct bedding in the house, this really encourages hedgehogs into your area, and they could become regular night-time visitors.”

Hedgehog champions

Abigail Gazzard, a postgraduate researcher at the University of Reading added: “Further analysis is required to investigate why hedgehogs seem to prefer homemade houses to artificial ones.

“This could be to do with the type of materials they are made from, they’re physical size, or whether they have other features such as tunnels and internal partitions, so the next step for us is to look into this aspect specifically.”

Emily concluded: “Thanks to these results analysed by the University of Reading, we now better understand what a hedgehog is looking for in a perfect home, so we hope existing Hedgehog Champions and those who aren’t yet champions, consider encouraging hedgehogs in gardens across Britain by building and introducing your own hedgehog houses.”

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor to The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from PTES. To support PTES’ ongoing conservation work, you can donate £3 by texting ‘PTES18 £3’ to 70070.

It was all a bit retro. A BBC radio presenter, looking out the window and seeing it’s still hot, and leaning into his microphone to ask “does this mean climate change is real?” 

Do not adjust your wireless. This really is the opening question on a segment about climate change. In 2018.

BBC Radio Cambridgeshire’s decision to have climate science denier and UKIP supporter Philip Foster on to debate a (non-climate) scientist about whether or not humans have caused climate change immediately drew much ire.

Start thinking

Foster completed an undergraduate degree in natural science at the University of Cambridge before teaching secondary and sixth-form schoolchildren in Nigeria. In 2012, Foster organised anti-climate action events to coincide with the landmark Paris climate conference, at which high-profile climate science deniers including the eccentric lord Christopher Monckton appeared.

The response to the BBC broadcast was largely down to Rupert Read, a philosopher at UEA and former Green party candidate for Cambridge, who is now chair of the Green House thinktank, tweeting that he’d been asked to go on but “said NO” after he was told the show’s plan.

“When it was described to me what it was going to be – just a straight back and forth debate between myself and a climate science denier – I thought this was time to say ‘no’”, he told DeSmog UK.

“And when they told me they were going to say ‘we’ve got this heatwave, does that mean climate change is real?’, I thought ‘no, this is not acceptable’”.

“If people start doing what I’m doing and start saying no to them if they’re going to have a climate science denier on to debate, then the BBC will have to start thinking about whether they can do this.”

Scientific credentials

It’s not the first time that the BBC has been in trouble for offering ‘false balance’ – when two sides of a debate are unreasonably given equal weight – for example, when the reality of human-caused climate change is presented as a controversy despite the overwhelming weight of evidence.

In October 2017, the BBC’s Today programme was forced to apologise and admit statements from climate science denier Nigel Lawson “should have been challenged”.

In 2011, Professor Phil Jones wrote a review for the BBC that criticised the network for allowing “an adversarial attitude to science which allows minority, or even contrarian, views an undue place”. It concluded that, “there should be no attempt to give equal weight to opinion and to evidence”.

Dr Emily Shuckburgh, a climate scientist based in Cambridge at the British Antarctic Survey, who pre-recorded a segment for the programme, told DeSmog UK that she felt the programme had “tried but failed” to explore how the recent heatwave related to climate change.

“The main problem is that it wasn’t properly explained what the scientific credentials of the participants were, and when incorrect statements were made they weren’t challenged, which is a dereliction of the BBC’s journalistic duty”.

Step-change

“I think it’s fine for them to have debates, and invite on whoever they want, but it has to be properly explained who is on. And when basic facts are misrepresented, that they are properly challenged”.

Read’s sentiment has certainly struck a chord. “The reaction I’ve had to this on social media has been far more positive than to any other cause I’ve ever championed”.

“I hope other people will take up this cause and say we’re just not going to play along with your games anymore, you’ve got to make more of a step-change towards the kind of debate we really need to be having.”

BBC Cambridgeshire has been contacted for comment.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

As our story unfolds we will see that climate denial is the invention of a network of think tanks first established to promote free market ideology.

The neoliberal intelligentsia running these organisations will have, almost without exception, read and been hugely influenced by a book called The Road to Serfdom by the Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek.

The book was originally rejected by London’s publishing houses and widely ridiculed by academics. Hayek himself recognised that it destroyed his credibility as a serious economist.

Influential cabal

And yet Serfdom became the Bible of both the American president Ronald Reagan and his British counterpart Margaret Thatcher. It provides the free market Kool-Aid which feeds Trump and the right wing Brexiteers. 

This angry polemic became the blueprint for their counter-revolution against progressive politics, the dismantling of any welfare state, the wholesale abandonment of progressive taxation and the bloody war against trade unions. This assault was meant to make us all free, all prosperous.

Hayek provided the belief system that would persuade an influential transatlantic network of politically motivated men to wage a sometimes dirty and criminal assault against the state and its regulators, and against climate scientists and their research.

But when you learn about the life of Hayek and read his works you soon discover that everything is not as this influential cabal would have us believe.

Vested interests

Even the ideas of their founding father have been distorted and twisted to suit the vested interests of those extremely wealthy, oil-enriched men who have quietly funded and led the neoliberal movement and exploited its followers in their war against climate change regulations.

Friedrich von Hayek was born in Vienna on 8 May 1899. His father, a part-time botany university lecturer, introduced Hayek to the relatively new and shocking ideas of Darwin, and the evolution of the species through natural selection and the “survival of the fittest”.

Historians have pondered whether Hayek’s early introduction to the theory of natural selection informed his economic thinking.

He would later develop an idea that corporations selling the products we buy, and indeed whole civilisations, were locked into a struggle for survival just as individual animals and their wider species struggled against each other in nature.

Human nature was, in Hayek’s later analysis, selfish, cruel, self-interested. Just as it is for the shark, or the rat. Only the money system of capitalism and the free market would allow this competition to flourish and create wealth.

This was Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’. Classical liberal economics reloaded. And it was this flirtation with “social Darwinism” that led a few to accuse Hayek and some of his followers of fascism.

But this distrust of the human and infatuation with the mystical free market had not always been central to Hayek’s ideas.

Childhood Ambitions

Hayek had from his childhood harboured ambitions to become a world leading academic. However, at the age of 14 this seemed to be an impossible dream. He had, according to biographer Lanny Ebenstein, “failed Latin, Greek and mathematics, and was near the bottom of his class most of the time”.

And it wasn’t long before Hayek found himself close to the maelstrom of world events. And the student was to become a confirmed Socialist.

The Russian socialist revolution took place when Hayek was 17 years old. A further Marx-inspired revolution followed in Budapest two years later and when its communist government collapsed many of its leaders fled to Vienna and filled its cafés and bars with passionate debates about the planned economy.

Hayek was fascinated by socialist literature and was disciplined at school for reading a radical pamphlet during a divinity lesson.

It was while the young man was optimistic for his own future, and convinced of the creative power of humanity, that he flirted with Marxism.

But events would conspire against him, breaking that confidence, and he began his journey to the politics of anxiety and fear.

The young student had assumed his future was relatively secure. His mother was from a “conservative, land owning family” and her “considerable inheritance” allowed the family to enjoy a life of privilege.

In the wake of the Great War, Austria was under the grip of hyperinflation and massive war debts and Hayek “saw his parents’ savings melt away”, records biographer Nicholas Wapshott.

Their descent into poverty meant Hayek after leaving school could no longer afford to study in Germany. In October 1921 he took a government post as a legal assistant administering the country’s debt.

In a further irony of history it was working for the state that saved Hayek from penury, and while working for the state he was converted to a new ideology that despised the state and its provision of welfare for the poor.

Intellectual mentor

By happenstance, he was assigned to the supervision of Ludwig von Mises, the grandfather of free market economics, who quickly became his intellectual mentor. Mises “sowed doubts in Hayek’s mind about the virtues of socialism,” according to Wapshott.

Hayek himself recalled: “The Vienna socialists, Marxists, were more doctrinaire than most other places, it only repelled me.” Hayek abandoned Socialism, and in the same moment was tutored by the intellectual father in its very antithesis, neoliberalism.

A decade later and Hayek would find himself presenting a lecture at the London School of Economics on the Strand in London where he would come to the attention of its head of economics, Lionel Robbins.

Robbins was labouring under a serious problem. He was in conflict with John Maynard Keynes who dominated the economic thinking of the time. Keynes was listented to – and Robbins ignored – during meetings of the prime minister Ramsey MacDonald’s committee for economists.

Keynes was considered to be the most brilliant and influential economist of the age.

He had allowed the British government to fund its war effort without the almost inevitable crisis of hyperinflation usually brought about by massive government spending. He had become the sage of government and also the darling of a new, progressive and socially liberated age.

The world was still coming to terms with the Wall Street crash, which followed an orgy of speculation and heralded the Great Depression.

Politicians and populations both turned to economists for advice on how to escape this desperate situation, and almost everybody accepted that the markets when left unchecked caused irreparable damage.

Paradox of Thrift

Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, wrote: “Keynes’s intellect was the sharpest and clearest I have ever known…when I argued with him I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.”

Keynes presented the “paradox of thrift” which explained that if everyone started saving during a depression less would be spent in the shops, economic growth would suffer and the country as a whole would be worse off.

Austerity was a false economy. He advocated a planned economy with the state using taxation during the boom and spending during recession to manage the business cycles which had plagued capitalism since the industrial revolution.

Keynes took to the airwaves, his biographer records, “urging the housewives of London in a radio broadcast to spend, spend, spend”.

Robbins was vehemently opposed to the dominant Keynesian paradigm and needed new ideas, new research, in order to add academic weight to his dislikes.

Hayek had published a series of articles extolling the virtues of the free market.

The Institute for Business Cycle Research, an association of industrialists in Vienna, sponsored a lecture tour to London. Robbins was in attendance – and was immediately convinced he had found exactly the man he had been looking for.

Robbins invited Hayek to speak at the London School of Economics, having read his latest publication, The Paradox of Saving, which directly contradicted Keynes. “This is the thing we need at the moment – to fight Keynes,” Robbins exclaimed.

Universal Admiration

Hayek’s lectures at the London School of Economics from January 1931 were considered a resounding success. Robbins persuaded Sir William Beveridge – his boss and the man who proposed that the state must intervene to wipe out poverty – to hire the Austrian free market economist.

The prestigious job came with a starting salary of £1,000 a year allowing Hayek to move to Hampstead Garden Suburbs with his family, buy his first car and join the exclusive Reform Club in Pall Mall. The Austrian had achieved his boyhood ambition and become a serious academic.

But how would he fare in the extraordinarily difficult task of challenging one of the finest economists of the ages, and overturning the almost universal admiration for Keynes and his proscriptions of state management of the markets through taxation?

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.

Global losses in seed diversity pose a significant threat to the health and stability of our food systems. The Gaia Foundation is working in partnership with the Soil Association, the Landworkers Alliance, Irish Seed Savers Association, and the Seed Cooperative to address this threat with a three-year long programme. 

Neil Munro, seed sovereignty programme manager and former head of the Heritage Seed Library at Garden Organic, argued: “In the UK, self-sufficiency in food production is currently at 62% and is estimated to fall to less than 50 percent by 2080.

“Seed security and diversity underpins food security. Producing and saving seed through ecologically sound and sustainable methods not only protects our agricultural heritage and biodiversity, it makes our food system more resilient, improves the condition of the land and benefits small-scale farmers.”

Building resilience

As the UK and much of Europe experiences a drought that has left farmers and growers everywhere at risk of low yields and crop failures, initiatives to increase seed diversity here around the planet have never been more important.

Ben Raskin, head of horticulture at the Soil Association explained: “Creating a more diverse seed system in the UK and Ireland is critical in the bigger picture of climate change. It is part of an ecologically sane approach to agriculture which supports the entire ecosystem, from the pollinators to the birds to the soil microbe, all of which have been gravely threatened by chemical agriculture”.

The UK and Ireland Seed Sovereignty Programme employs five experienced regional coordinators, based in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and east and west England, who are working closely with farmers, seed producers, horticulturists and commercial growers to conserve threatened seeds and to breed new varieties for future resilience.

Maria Scholten, coordinator for Scotland said: “In Scotland, proud testimony of local seed production are the landraces grown by crofters on the Outer Hebrides and Northern Isles. Here, crofters keep seeds available for other crofters; these are truly islands of seed sovereignty.

“The landraces are locally adapted to tough conditions and contributing significantly to biodiversity, particularly along the Machair. Many more examples of these local low-input production systems will make our food system far more resilient.”

Lost arts

Travelling to every corner of the UK and Ireland, the programme’s coordinators have observed that the loss of seed diversity goes hand-in-hand with the loss of knowledge and skills necessary to select, save and breed seed. 

Katie Hastings, coordinator for Wales said: “One of the first things the growers told me is that despite knowing a great deal about land management and vegetable production, many of them didn’t have the skills to produce seed. The art of completing the growing cycle on-farm by producing the seed for the next crop is somehow being lost, and the growers I was meeting wanted to change that.”

Identifying and working with enthusiastic farmers and growers, the coordinators are working to undo this loss. 

Katie added: “With a strong market for Welsh-grown seed and a burst of energy from growers keen to learn, my work is to bring these two worlds together”. 

Organic seeds

The programme is specifically focusing on increasing the supply of organic seed, produced without the use of harmful pesticides and herbicides, to create the basis for a more revolutionary shift towards a healthier, ecologically sound food system in the UK.

Munro said: “At present it is estimated that just three percent of the seed produced in the UK is organic. A large proportion of produce grown by organic producers isn’t grown from organic seed in the first place; there simply isn’t the quality and quantity available to do so.

“But across the UK there is a growing market for home-grown organic seed and an appetite to support and foster a more ecologically sustainable food system through the entire cycle of agriculture. That means starting by addressing the lack of organic seed, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

This Author

Rowan Phillomore is deputy director and head of communications at The Gaia Foundation. More information about the Seed Sovereignty UK & Ireland Programme can be found at the dedicated website: www.seedsovereignty.info