A flight tax, doubled environmental spending, subsidies for electric bikes and low-emission cars, a new climate law, and a proposal that tripled the cost of European emissions allowances: Sweden’s Green Party has been busy in its first-ever period in government.

The latest issue of the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now.

“It’s a massive list if you compare those results with what has been achieved by previous governments when it comes to climate and environment,” says Fredrik Hannerz, until recently special adviser to the country’s climate minister, Isabella Lövin. 

“They have actually achieved a lot,” agrees Roger Hildingsson, a researcher at Lund University. “In terms of greening Swedish public administration and environmental policy, they have been very hard-working.” 

Braving ridicule 

Looking at the media coverage, however, you wouldn’t know it. The Greens have been hammered in the press almost since the day they took office on 3 October 2014 as the junior partner in a Social Democrat-led government. In the election scheduled for 9 September this year, they will find out just what price they have paid for their place in power.

When the Swedish state power firm Vattenfall sold its German lignite coal mines and power plants two years ago, rather than seeking to end the use of that fossil fuel, it was seen as a catastrophic climbdown, earning the party leadership the annual Greenwash Award from the pressure group Friends of the Earth. The future of the lignite mines had been such an important part of the 2014 campaign that Lövin and Gustav Fridolin, the party’s spokespeople (co-leaders), braved ridicule by brandishing chunks of coal in TV debates. 

“When you put yourself on these high horses, the higher you ride the harder you fall,” Hildingsson says. “From a green, ecological point of view, I would say it’s the worst failure for the party.” 

Hannerz argues that the Vattenfall affair, along with the party’s failure to stop an airport expansion and a ring road around Stockholm, involved “a miscommunication of what could be achieved”. 

“The party should have been much more strategic early on and realised that these things were not possible to stop,” he says.

Losing support

The price has been heavy, with the party losing roughly half of its 20,000 members and about half of its support among the electorate for this, a humiliating climbdown on immigration, and a scandal over a minister’s alleged Islamist and Turkish fascist connections. 

Hannerz argues that many Green voters have not understood the limited power that comes with the party’s 25 seats in parliament, given the 112 held by the Social Democrats. 

“Many people didn’t understand what big sacrifices it would entail,” he says. “The party has been in opposition for such a long time.” 

He also thinks environmental pressure groups and NGOs have not given the party the sort of outside support that the Social Democrats can rely on from trade unions, tending to criticise it rather than celebrate its successes.

Axel Hallberg, co-spokesperson for the Young Greens, agrees that it has been difficult to keep his members on board. 

“The immigration policy changes in 2015 were extremely tough, especially for the Young Greens, but when you now look back from my perspective after four years, I think it’s obvious now that we have been able to make incredible changes,” he says.

Greenhouse emissions

Hallberg hopes that the new owners of Vattenfall’s former coal mines will never develop them now that the ‘Swedish Proposal’, which will see millions of tonnes of unused EU emissions allowances cancelled annually, has tripled the carbon price. 

In exchange for the Vattenfall climbdown, the party got the Social Democrats to agree to buy and cancel 300 million kronor (£25 million) -worth of EU emissions allowances a year, one of more than 50 different reforms the party lists as achievements. 

Others include changing Sweden’s carbon tax to make it increase with inflation, overseeing a rise in petrol taxes, and bringing in subsidies to help local municipalities and industry invest in climate-friendly projects. 

Hannerz thinks the most significant change is the Climate Policy Framework committing Sweden to bringing net emissions of greenhouse gases to zero by 2045; António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, described it in April this year as “probably the best programme in the world in relation to climate action”. 

The framework includes a climate law that will force future governments to report every four years on their progress towards the 2045 goal and outline the policies they are introdu­cing. It’s a hugely significant change and it wouldn’t have happened without the Greens – but very few Swedes know about it. 

Flight tax

“We’ve been so focused on getting things done and ticking things off our very long list that we haven’t focused very much on communicating those results,” Hannerz admits. “Maybe we could have halved the list of policies and doubled the effort on communicating those policies, but that’s not the way the Green Party worked.”

This started changing this year, with policies such as the flight tax that came into force in April as a major concession from the Social Democrats. 

Hildingsson believes the tax has helped the Greens differentiate themselves, particularly from the economically liberal Centre Party, which targets green voters but opposes the flight tax and was nominated for this year’s Greenwash Award as a result. 

With Swedish public opinion swinging over the past year from opposing the flight tax to supporting it, the Greens have been campaigning in the run-up to this September’s election on a promise to increase it by between 60kr and 400kr (£5 and £35) per person per flight. 

For ordinary Swedes, the most visible green policy has been the subsidy of up to 10,000kr (£850) for those who buy an electric bicycle. This has been very popular, with 33,000 people applying for it in its first month of operation this May.

Symbolic politics

“Opponents criticise it for being cost-inefficient, symbolic politics, and it might well be that, but as part of telling a story it is significant,” Hildingsson says. “One way to illustrate what a low-carbon society looks like is to say, ‘We will have more electric vehicles.’” 

It’s not unusual for a junior coalition partner to get a battering in government, as the UK’s Liberal Democrats would tell you after their experiences in coalition with the Conservatives from 2010 to 2015. But the Greens in Luxembourg, also in coalition recently, are projected to win the same share of parliamentary seats in this year’s election as they did in 2013. 

The Finnish Green League even managed to increase its share of the vote in 2015 after a period in coalition, partly because, unlike their Swedish neighbours, the party’s ministers resigned when it didn’t get its way over a new nuclear power station. 

Carl Schlyter, one of a rebel faction of Swedish Green MPs, argues that the Swedish party should have threatened to leave over Vattenfall’s coal.” If you’re dealing with old-fashioned power politicians from the Social Democrats, you must be willing to sacrifice your ministerial positions in order to achieve your objectives,” he maintains.

Political party

But Hannerz thinks this misunderstands what the Swedish Green Party is for. “This is not a pressure a group. This is not an NGO. It’s actually a political party, and a political party needs to be united in order to achieve results,” he argues. 

“Why didn’t we leave government? Because the main focus has been on achieving results. We have always seen that we can make more of a difference if we are still in. And we have.” 

This Author

Richard Orange is a freelance journalist based in Sweden. This article first appeared in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. The latest issue is out now.

 

Future historians interested in establishing how Britain became a chief cheerleader of scepticism only 30 years after Thatcher led the world on climate change science and policy will have to pay close attention to the morning of 1 January 1993.

It all began at the offices of the free-market think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in Lord North Street (pictured). Here, historians will discover that it was John Blundell, a diehard Thatcherite and the IEA’s new director general, who undid this part of Thatcher’s legacy.

Almost as soon as he arrived in Westminster to head up the IEA, Blundell called the young, erudite Roger Bate into his new office and “challenged” him to establish a new Environment Unit within the institute.

The IEA would form a specialist department to bring together economists, philosophers and other academics to better analyse and offer a counterweight to environmentalism. The initiative was inspired by founder of the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) Fred Smith‘s work in the United States.

New Ideas

Blundell was keen to introduce new ideas and methods during his first 100 days as director general. But he also had a profound and instinctive desire to challenge the ever-growing popularity of environmentalism, which he assumed to be merely a new mask for communism.

“Socialism survives, however, by transmuting itself into new forms,” he wrote some years later. “State-run enterprises are now frowned upon, but the ever-expanding volume of regulation – financial, environmental, health and safety – serves to empower the state by other means.”

Blundell strongly believed that environmentalists were “not remotely interested in improvement.” He wrote: “The idea of a new, improved, kinder, gentler capitalism is utterly alien to them.”

“They want to tear it down and destroy it…the ‘environmental movement’ is simply a means to an end, the outright destruction of business, the total demise of capitalism…appeasement has never and will never work.”

‘Reasonable’ reports

As Blundell’s new recruit, Bate began planning a major conference in London that would be attended by academics and leaders from British businesses about to be strangled by environmental regulations.

His work with Smith was also used as the basis for a new publication attacking the science of climate change by strongly emphasising any uncertainties. He knew exactly the right person to help produce a professional and reasonable-sounding polemic: Julian Morris.

Morris completed a masters in Environment and Resource Economics at University College London (UCL) before going to Cambridge University to study a Masters in Philosophy in Land Economics. He said: “I attended one or two IEA lectures while I was at UCL and met John after one of those.”

“Roger asked me to co-author a paper on global warming with him in late 1993. I was working as an econometrician in Frankfurt when I wrote my sections of that paper. I was subsequently commissioned by the IEA to write a paper on desertification. While I was writing that paper, I was hired by the IEA as a research fellow.”

Mark Pennington, a young academic who reacted strongly against the teaching of Marx at university, would also write reports for the think tank.

A member of the IEA’s academic advisory board, Pennington recalled: “[Blundell] felt that in the US there were some organisations or some of the think tanks in the US like the Cato Institute and the CEI who had a previous record of exposing what they saw to be junk science….and there wasn’t anything similar in the UK, and therefore the Environment Unit could play some role in that.”

Inform the Public

Bate was also responsible for raising cash for this new unit. He sent the programme for his new outfit to his friends at the tobacco company Philip Morris.

“We aim to bring balance to the often highly politicised discussion and, most important, to inform opinion leaders and the general public,” it read.

The unit would publish and hold public events attacking government intervention relating to “recycling, eco-labelling, land use regulations, private wildlife conservation, water and air pollution, transport policy, desertification, population and environmental education”.

The Environment Unit, sounding almost like a public relations company, boasted that “its research and authors have been featured in all of London’s major newspapers and have received international coverage.”

At first, the IEA listed its donors in the briefings sent to potential future funders; although these were not made public. These donors included British Petroleum (BP), the Esso oil company and the US-based Earhart Foundation.

Sceptic Risk

Richard Ritchie, a parliamentary lobbyist and advisor to BP, was in close consultation with Blundell during the earliest days of the environment movement. He recalls that oil companies, even at this early stage in the debate, were in fact reluctant to support a climate sceptic outfit, concerned at the risk to their finely tuned public relations campaigns.

Blundell was shocked after working for Koch in America that the oil corporations would not come out fighting against the green lobby and for free-market capitalism.

Ritchie told me: “He couldn’t understand why oil companies weren’t prepared much more openly to support the IEA on this issue.  Exxon challenged the science of climate change.”

“Now actually, I personally and BP corporately were never quite sure whether that was the right thing to do and there were various aspects of this. Firstly, I felt that BP challenging the science of climate change was rather like a tobacco company challenging the science of cancer – even if we were right, people wouldn’t listen to you.”

He added: “I didn’t feel that the IEA had any expertise on the science. They were perfectly entitled to draw attention to the fact that there was a scientific debate but I don’t think that they had any sort of intellectual heritage for saying the science is wrong.”

“I kept saying to John Blundell and I said it to Roger and all the rest I said look, why don’t you concentrate on the fact that there is a free market response to climate change if it is happening?”

“Rather than deny that it’s happening … what really worried me about the climate change debate, and still does, was that it became the left-wing economic, left-wing economists who’d lost the battle over price and income controls had lost the battle over regulation saw this as a way of starting the battle again.”

“It was their excuse for regulation, their excuse for price controls, their excuse for new taxes. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”      

Science vs Economics

A serious split started to emerge within the IEA on the issue of climate change with the trustees themselves divided about whether the Environment Unit should attack the science or instead admit there was a problem emerging and devise free-market solutions.

Pennington thought the science of climate change was reliable: “There was always an internal debate on the advisory committee about the extent to which the IEA should be questioning the science. Wasn’t the best thing to say, let’s accept that climate change is happening and that it may have a human component and therefore to say what would a market based approach recommend?”

“There was always a bit of tension [between] people who thought this was the most appropriate route and the overview which was that some of the science in the area was being politically motivated, was being politically manipulated. I know Julian Morris was quite keen on that sort of approach.”

He added: “I’m not sure there is a market solution, I am not sure that there’s any solution to climate change, that was my personal view.”

Oil Funding

Linda Whetstone, Antony Fisher’s daughter and IEA trustee, on the other hand, believed they should challenge the science but confirmed they were seriously concerned that if the public were to discover that the IEA was funded by oil while pumping out the main sceptic publications available in Britain, it could damage their reputation.

Whetstone is adamant that the money was not the motive: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s climate change or anything else, we basically don’t think governments are the solution to a lot of these problems, all we think that there are other better solutions”.

She added: “There were a time when if you dared challenge climate science some people treated you as if you were an absolute pariah, whereas now I think those who do challenge its effects are regarded well, they’re listened to.”

Blundell was just about able to carry his trustees with him, and the Environment Unit set about the task of spreading the sceptic gospel across Britain with verve and gusto.

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 article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Bird news travels fast on the east coast of England. Today, a stilt sandpiper has been spotted, a bird not seen in Lincolnshire since 1965.

Twitchers stream to the RSPB reserve at Frampton Marsh. Opening hours are extended. The charity warns visitors not to speed in their cars. “No bird is worth causing an accident for!” they tweet.

This is the edge of the Wash, England’s biggest site of special scientific interest (SSSI), otherwise known as a site protected by law for biodiversity reasons.

Loudest bird

This vast bay is laden with habitats: mud flats, open water, salt marshes, freshwater marshes, brackish lagoons, shingle structures, sandbanks, chalk cliffs, gravel pits.

It is, in the words of the government, “one of the last truly wild areas in Britain”, and “an established area for scientific research and monitoring.”

But the government’s conservation body Natural England hasn’t monitored most of this SSSI, nor the one on the North Norfolk coast immediately next to it, for eight or nine years.

It’s not unusual here to see creatures that are rarely seen elsewhere in the UK. There are marsh harriers (now rarer than golden eagles in the UK), water voles (the most rapidly declining mammal of recent years) and bitterns, Britain’s loudest bird, which almost became extinct in the UK in the nineties.

Climate change

Data now shows that almost half of England’s best wildlife sites haven’t been monitored by the government in the last six years, as national guidelines dictate. 

The Wash is home to the largest state-owned nature reserve in England. Other parts of it are privately owned, alongside one RSPB nature reserve at Snettisham.

The lack of monitoring is less of an issue along the Norfolk coast, where several conservation charities manage most of the landscape, but without government oversight, they are increasingly being left to regulate themselves and pick up where government intervention is lacking.

Meanwhile this landscape, and the crowd of habitats it is home to, is changing.

No county in mainland UK is more at risk from climate change than flat, low-lying Norfolk. The tide is steadily retreating and eating away at the habitats.

Declining populations

On the border of Norfolk and Lincolnshire, the Wash, is home to the UK’s most important wetlands, one of England’s largest common seal populations and is a site of international significance for wintering birds.

Every year, up to half a million flock here on their annual migration to feed. When the tide pushes them off the mudflats, they take to the air in conjunction, swooping together in a vast spectacle.

Many of the birds on the Wash and Norfolk coast are thought to be in a state of national decline including ringed plovers, curlew, oystercatcher, dunlin and redshank.

The declines are thought to be partly down to climate change but local conservationists have more immediate concerns.

When parts of the two sites were last assessed, Natural England noted issues with people and dogs disturbing breeding birds, overgrazing, scrub invasion, and declining populations of seals, redshank and brent geese, which it said are “a serious cause for concern”.  

Better state

“Things are changing all the time,” says John Badley, manager of the RSPB reserve at Frampton Marsh.

“Without the monitoring and the management, there could be real concerns for some of those important species that are the reason why the Wash is designated in the first place.

We absolutely have to keep on top of what’s going on because without the knowledge we will not be successful in making sure we keep the Wash as an SSSI”

A Natural England spokesperson told Unearthed: “England’s sites of special scientific interest are essential to protect the very best examples of our precious natural heritage and wildlife for generations to come. 

We are committed to safeguarding these unique areas of England, which is underlined in the government’s 25 Year environment plan, as we work to make sure we leave our environment in a better state than we found it.”

Mudflats

Some of the declining bird species were identified as an issue for the Wash in a study commissioned by Natural England in 2014, but it did not capture data itself.

The literature review largely references data from 2011 and recognises that “there is a wealth of information” that it does not capture, including long-term data on habitat change or drivers related to human activity.

While the RSPB and other conservation organisations on the coast here monitor the sites they own, the vast majority of SSSI sites are owned privately or by government.

Badley is concerned that a lack of data could be causing problems on the Wash:

“As we don’t know what’s happening with the extent of mudflats we’re not in a position to know whether we need to try to do anything about it – such as to allow or create replacement habitat – and whether this might be contributing to the declines of any of the important species.”

Mediterranean gull

It’s not just birds that are feeling the temperature rise.

Jeff Price is a senior researcher at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. Last year, he completed a case study on Norfolk to identify which species would find the area uninhabitable by rising temperatures.

His modelling showed that 15 bird species, eight mammals, three amphibians, two reptiles, 11 butterflies, 180 moths, seven dragonflies, 12 bumblebees, 14 grasshoppers, 11 shieldbugs, two ferns, one orchid and one tree could be wiped out by a 2C temperature rise. A far smaller number of species could find the area more habitable.

“It’s a wake up call that we need to be monitoring these species,” he told Wired in April.As a result of climate change, intensive farming and urbanisation,  more than one in ten of the UK’s wildlife species is threatened with extinction, making it “among the most nature depleted countries in the world”, according to a major report published in 2016.

Ray Kimber is a local who has been birdwatching here for 52 years.

“We’ve seen huge increases in some birds and huge decreases in others,” he tells me. “Back in the 1970s I stood on our east bank and watched hundreds of turtle doves migrating through here.I saw my first mediterranean gull in the 1980s….we had 56 pairs breeding this year.”

Storms

Kimber was also here to witness the storm surge of December 2013, the highest in England for 65 years. Homes collapsed, hundreds were evacuated and roads were submerged amid the flooding.

The Met Office later concluded that although there was “no definitive answer” as to the cause of the UK’s extreme storms that winter, “all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change”.

The flooding damaged freshwater habitats, swept away 80-90% of the sand dunes on some parts of the coast and destroyed bird hides on a reserve. Dead trees still litter the sand, killed by saltwater intrusion from the storm and brought down further by the Beast from the East earlier this year.

Only one in 73 of the units on the Norfolk coast SSSI have been monitored by Natural England since the storm; most were last assessed in 2009 or 2010.

The habitats are recovering and a local crowdfunding campaign has helped raise money to repair the damage, but there are concerns that as these events become more frequent, neither nature nor local resources will be able to keep up.

“If we destroy natural habitats, it affects all of us,” says Kimber “It’s not just the wildlife. It’s people’s wellbeing. It’s affecting our own way of life. It will be a very sad thing if just through lack of money the whole Norfolk coast disappeared. It would be a loss to millions of people, a whole load of important wildlife species not just birds, but plants, insects, mammals – things that are nationally rare. 

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

The government is failing to monitor almost half of England’s “most important wildlife sites”, putting them at risk of fly tipping, pollution, water contamination, invasive species, and the unchecked impacts of a changing climate.

Of the 4,126 sites of special scientific interest (SSSIs) currently in existence, 47 percent have not been examined in the last six years, as is required by national monitoring guidelines, according to data released by the environment department this summer.

Natural England, the government agency responsible for monitoring, has faced significant budget cuts in recent years. 

Budget cuts

A source inside the body told Unearthed that “we just don’t know what the condition of the best habitats in the country is anymore” and warned that the body could be open to legal challenges because staff are making decisions based on old data.

The news comes eight months after Theresa May launched the government’s 25 year environment plan, which promised to “not only conserve but enhance” protected areas.

A spokesperson for Natural England said that the body is committed to safeguarding these areas.

Most of the Wash, England’s biggest SSSI, and the North Norfolk coast adjacent to it, have not been monitored in eight to nine years, despite the region being home to many threatened species and one of the most susceptible parts of the UK to the changing climate.

Co-leader of the Green party Caroline Lucas, who requested the data through a parliamentary question, accused the government of neglect and called on them to reverse budget cuts to Natural England.

Cross-party MPs and environmental NGOs have since called for a new watchdog “with sharp teeth” and funding to enforce environmental law post-Brexit.

The EU has launched several infringement procedures against member states for failing to take measures to conserve protected areas. The power to do so in the UK would cease after Brexit.

‘Huge cause for concern’

SSSIs afford legal protection to the UK’s most significant areas for wildlife, plants, geological and physical features, including many areas within national parks and nature reserves. The vast majority are owned by government or private landowners.

As well as iconic parts of the Lake District, Exmoor and the Pennines,parts of SSSIs within the South Downs around Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters have not been monitored for 10 years, while those inside Cornwall’s Lizard peninsula and St Michael’s Mount were last monitored in 2011.

These sites were then recorded as in “favourable condition”. But parts of Lake District, Exmoor and the Pennines were found to be “unfavourable”.

A source inside Natural England who spoke to Unearthed on condition of anonymity said that the “hundreds of small sites”, which are often privately owned, are of greater concern because local people in areas that receive a high public footfall will often flag problems directly with them.

Potential problems that could be missed through lack of monitoring range from illegal fires and fly tipping to invasive species and peatland drainage or pollution, which can kill wildlife or contaminate water sources.

The source added: “We could be missing all kinds of things that might have been going on for years. We just don’t know what the condition of the best habitats in the country is anymore.”

The lack of monitoring also means that decisions about the type of work or activities that are permitted on sites – which could disturb threatened species – are now being made using old and often outdated data, they told Unearthed.

“There’s a big risk that if we have to make a decision on a wildlife licensing issue – such as for culling, handling or disturbing the habitats of protected species – and the data we are using to grant it is out of date, that we could be challenged legally.”

Unfavourable, declining

Although the stipulation to monitor every six years is not a legal requirement in itself, the national guidelines are the product of a requirement to monitor from the Environmental Protection Act 1990. Unearthed now understands that the government is no longer committed to this target.

The source added: “It is a very bleak picture…The morale among staff is abysmal. How are we supposed to manage the country’s most important wildlife sites without monitoring their condition?”

The RSPB told Unearthed the lack of monitoring is a “huge cause for concern.”

More than one in ten of the UK’s wildlife species is threatened with extinction, making it “among the most nature depleted countries in the world”, according to a major report published in 2016.

When the government’s 25 year environment plan was launched by the prime minister in January, it set a new target to restore 75% of protected sites to favourable condition, meaning that all features for which the site is designated should be meeting minimum standards to be conserved.

The proportion currently in favourable condition stands at 39%; but this figure is now partly based on old data.

A further 55% are reported to be in “unfavourable recovering” condition, which means that a plan is in place to aid recovery, but does not mean the plan is funded, being implemented or being effective. The remaining sites are reported to be in an “unfavourable – no change” or “unfavourable declining” condition.

Ten years ago, a quarter of sites had not been monitored within six years, compared to almost half today.

RSPB’s head of site conservation Kate Jennings told Unearthed: “There are bound to be loads of things going wrong because of a lack of monitoring – pollution events, fly tipping, overgrazing, the spread of invasive species – but we generally don’t know what they are until the monitoring gets done.

“SSSIs protect the most important wildlife sites in England and so it’s vital that they are properly protected and restored to provide strongholds and refuges for habitats and species. The fact that so many of the sites are going unchecked is a huge cause for concern, especially at a time when we know that many are in trouble. We need a huge step change in action.”

Budget cuts

Natural England’s annual budget is now close to half what it was a decade ago. In 2017/18 it was £112m, down from £200m in 2006/7, its chairman Andrew Sells told parliament in December.

Lucas told Unearthed: “The government cuts that have resulted in almost half of our precious Sites of Special Scientific Interest not being assessed for at least six years are a glaringly false economy. These beautiful places and unique habitats are irreplaceable. It is short-sighted and downright irresponsible for the government to neglect them. Ministers must urgently reverse cuts to Natural England’s budget and expand its specialist team.”

The agency is also expecting to see a drop in EU funds, according to its annual report. It states that it received £22m in EU funds last year, but that these are not used for statutory work.

At least 75 Natural England staff are currently being moved to DEFRA on secondment, Unearthed understands. It’s thought that they are being moved to work on Brexit.

Documents leaked to Unearthed two years ago revealed that the agency was planning to rein its regulatory duties and was looking for funding from the business it assesses as it anticipated budget cuts of up to £30m by 2020.

Questions have since been raised about the independence of Natural England, which in the last couple of years has lost its own press office. Its communications are now run by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

The House of Lords issued a report last year warning that “successive reductions to its budget have limited its ability to perform key functions….and will, ultimately, lead to Natural England becoming unable to fulfill its general purpose.”

A Natural England spokesperson told Unearthed: “England’s sites of special scientific interest are essential to protect the very best examples of our precious natural heritage and wildlife for generations to come. 

“We are committed to safeguarding these unique areas of England, which is underlined in the government’s 25 Year environment plan, as we work to make sure we leave our environment in a better state than we found it.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.

“It’s about low tax, low regulation — an economy fit for hedge fund owners”. That’s how Peter Jukes, an investigative journalist with Byline Media, describes the aims of a network of shadowy thinktanks and campaign groups operating out of offices on Tufton Street, just around the corner from the Houses of Parliament.

DeSmog UK has previously mapped all the key connection between the organisations, many of which are leading voices in for Brexit and climate science denial.

One of the Tufton Street groups, the Institute of Economic Affairs, recently hit headlines after undercover reporters filmed its Director appearing to suggest funders could get access to government ministers through the think tank.

Launder the money

Another Tufton group, the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), is the UK’s premier climate science denial campaign group. DeSmog UK has previously revealed the organisations ties to government, the media, and US think tanks with ties to President Trump.

Jukes made the comments as part of a new exposé from Real Media. He was joined by myself and OpenDemocracy UK co-editor, Adam Ramsay, who pointed out that the end game for all these organisations was pushing for a hard Brexit, cutting environmental regulation, and protecting the assets of the rich.

Ramsay said, “rather than having a close association with the EU and regulations around the food we eat, and protecting the environment and the climate and so on, [the network] wants us instead to do a trade deal with America, which means much less regulation”.

Alt-right press

“Tax havens are very keen to ensure Brexit is postive for them, and they can essentially continue to be a hub for money laundering — so they’re paying probably for reports from these groups to make that case for them through the Brexit process.”

“For the very rich people in the world, they want to push Britain further offshore and move it away from the regulations in the EU and make sure we can continue to launder the money for the very rich.”

And this goal is supported by an alt-right press in which “there is definitely an anti-deomcratic tendency”, Jukes said. The alt-right messages are then parroted by a mainstream press that is largely owned by the people the Tufton St network’s agenda is designed to favour, Jukes said.

“Because of their money, they are having a big influence on contemporary discourse in this country”.

This Author

Mat Hope is editor of DeSmog UK, where this article first appeared.

People don’t usually associate England’s countryside with crime. Crime happens everywhere, but there are big differences between urban and rural crime.  

For instance, quad bikes are a common sight in rural areas – they’re used by farmers, gamekeepers, and terrier men attached to fox hunts. They’re just the thing for narrow lanes, rough tracks, crossing fields and riding through woodland. 

This year has seen a huge rise in quad bike theft right across the country.      

Rural crime

What makes rural crime challenging is that so much of it is unseen. Not every farmyard has a neighbour watching and helping to prevent the theft of valuable farm machinery. Not every field has a house beside it to deter the theft of animals. Not every stable is secure enough to prevent expensive saddles and bridles being stolen.  

Poaching is common, particularly deer and game birds. Fish stocks disappear from ponds, fruit and vegetables from gardens and lawnmowers from garden sheds.  

One constant headache for both police and local authorities is fly-tipping.  Rather than take your old fridge to the local council tip, why not dump it in the countryside?  Or pay someone to do it for you.

Rural areas cover a lot of ground. The population of an urban policing area might perhaps cover 4 square miles. Policing a similar population in a rural area could cover 100 square miles or more – that’s a lot of driving for rural police who are also policing the local towns.

Cuts to resources

Farmers complain about a lack of police response. Hunt saboteurs and monitors, facing physical violence from hunt supporters, also complain that when they report an incident, the police often don’t turn up, or come too late.  

Getting to rural locations can be a big challenge off the main road.  Also, when a police presence is needed elsewhere or a major incident is being dealt with, not many officers are available.  

They don’t have that many, full stop. Since 2010 police forces in England and Wales have lost around 21,000 officers. Between 2010 and 2015 they suffered a cut of 20 percent in their funding, some forces taking a bigger hit than others. But all are asked to do more with less money and fewer people.  

In addition, some forces have also had to deal with policing the badger culls. Apparently, during the 2017 culls, Dorset officers doing 12-hour shifts had to provide/pay for their own food. Money is that tight. Of those forces dealing with culling in the western region:

• Avon & Somerset lost 672 police officers and 115 community support officers
• Gloucester lost 254 police officers and 35 community support officers
• Dorset lost 210 police officers and 78 community support officers
• Devon & Cornwall lost 635 police officers and 35 community support officers

 

Policing and politics

In 2012, Police and Crimes Commissioners (PCCs) were introduced.  This was not popular with a lot of people, police included, who felt that politics should not be brought into policing (most of the PCC candidates ran under a party ticket).  

What is interesting is that those counties that were first scheduled to have badger culling (Somerset, Gloucester and Dorset) all voted for independent PCCs.  

There were some benefits. In 2014 28 PCCs with largely rural constituencies formed the National Rural Crime Network (NRCN) and county forces set up rural rime teams.  

The NRCN website states: “The impacts of rural crime are many and varied. The Network is concerned with all crime and anti-social behaviour occurring in rural areas and recognises that the challenges and solutions are often different to those in cities and urban areas.”

Indeed. When the badger culls started in 2013, both Avon & Somerset and Gloucester police forces had to use urban police officers to police the culling.  To those trying to protect the badgers it quickly became clear how unfamiliar urban officers were with rural ways. 

Unfamiliar territory 

Gloucester badger patrollers reported that police knew little of the Countryside & Rights of Way Act so patrollers were arrested for what was perfectly legal behaviour; police were often not equipped with suitable clothing – an absence of welly boots for one thing – and were uneasy working in the dark, due to the absence of street lighting).  

In 2014 Gloucester’s policing improved as their liaison team was in contact with GABS as well as the cullers.  

Dorset’s cull started in 2015.  Dorset’s police had wisely noted the mistakes in policing in the previous two years and were consulting with DBBW well before the start of Dorset’s cull.  

Even better, two of Dorset’s most admired wildlife officers, PCs Dave Mullins and Phil Sugrue, were on the liaison team.  They were so good at their job that it is rumoured that Devon & Cornwall police sought their advice.

The policing wasn’t perfect in the first year and there were some contentious issues, but Dorset’s badger protectors could count themselves lucky that they were dealing with unbiased, well-informed officers who would follow up any reports of harassment or intimidation by farmers and culling contractors as well as incidents reported by farmers.   

Hidden inhabitants

But at a 2016 meeting at Avon & Somerset Police headquarters, the Silver Commander of their police liaison team was challenged by a woman complaining that she was tired of her car being pulled over by police at night during the culls. 

Demonstrating how little their rural policing had moved on, the reply was astonishing: “Well, if you’re driving around in the countryside after 10pm you must be up to no good.” 

Was it that kind of attitude surfacing during the culls that highlighted the need for rural crime strategies and trained wildlife officers. Those strategies should meaningfully include those largely hidden inhabitants of the countryside, the wildlife. 

The Essex Police Rural Strategy (2017) mentions hare coursing and has a photo of a badger.  

However, their Rural Crime page says this: “Essex Police also has a force wildlife officer supported by specialist wildlife officers covering our three local policing areas; North, West and South. They specialise in investigating wildlife and environmental crime and work closely with the RSPCA to protect wildlife.”

Specialist skills?

West Mercia Police, highlighting their wildlife crime officers, seem protective of wildlife, but then say this: “We work with partner organisations like the Angling Trust and the NFU”, neither of which are known for their love of wildlife.  

The NFU is a major backer of the badger culls.  When beavers appeared on Devon’s River Otter the Angling Trust wanted the right to shoot them as an ‘invasive species’, despite non-fish eating beavers benefiting fish populations.  

Dyfed & Powys Police cover over half the land mass of Wales, much of which is rural. They ‘have a dedicated wildlife crime officer’ – for half of Wales?  

Their 2017 Rural Crime Strategy booklet says that specialist rural skills and knowledge will be developed and officers will receive “enhanced training”.  Wildlife crime is featured only at the bottom of a list of rural crime challenges.

On the plus side, considering that Dyfed and Powys are home to many fox hunts, the list does include illegal hunting.

Fox hunting 

Lincolnshire has always been a fox hunting county.  Lincolnshire Police has a brief page on hunting and poaching which cites illegal hunting as a crime, but its list of organisations that can offer help and support includes the Countryside Alliance.

Thames Valley Police cover three counties – Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. An article describing the rural crime strategy of the combined counties makes no mention of wildlife or hunting, even though this area covers part of the Kimblewick Hunt territory. 

In 2017 Kimblewick Hunt euthanised over 90 hounds because they were infected by bovine TB. 

The Thames Valley website says: ‘Most forces have at least one wildlife crime officer and many have dedicated units. We also work with partner agencies to investigate, prevent and tackle wildlife crime.” Asked for more detailed information, they confirmed that each Local Police Area (LPA) has one wildlife officer, totalling 11 officers across three counties.

After a late start, Gloucester Police (covering 1216 square miles) are doing well. In June this year they officially launched their rural crime team.  They say, “Rural and wildlife crime has always been investigated in Gloucestershire, but many of the officers responsible have been doing so alongside other roles and in their own time.” 

Controlling wildlife 

But what  Gloucester Police have now put together is impressive: “The team comprises four Rural Crime Officers (RCOs), one in each rural policing area, who will be led by a co-ordinator and supported by 23 Rural and Environmental Crime Officers (RECLOs) and volunteers”.

Avon & Somerset Police (Somerset is 1610 square miles) said it that currently has “six trained Wildlife Officers who have all received national wildlife training. Three officers are awaiting training and three have been locally trained, however, this training is not nationally accredited”. 

The Devon and Cornwall Police (11 trained officers covering 3965 square miles) appear fairly anti-wildlife.  Their advice page opens with a description of how wildlife damages farmland (starting with badgers) and advice on how to ‘control’ wildlife.  

Not listed as a wildlife crime but under a section titled “People being cruel to animals” their website states: “Violence towards badgers, which includes being buried alive or being ripped apart by dogs”, which seems a gleefully gruesome description.  

‘Being ripped apart’ should be properly listed as the crime of badger baiting.  ‘Being buried alive’ is the crime of interfering with a badger sett, in this particular instance known as sett blocking.  Countrywide, sett blocking is done by hunt terrier men to stop illegally hunted foxes going to earth. 

Wildlife training

There is no mention of illegal hunting. According to hunt monitors in Devon, the police do not support their efforts to stop illegal hunting, can be unwilling to intervene in assaults on monitors and take the view that, to quote: “none of this would happen if you lot went away.”

Cheshire (another county policing badger culls) has a comprehensive strategy for rural crime policing, and sends officers on Wildlife Foundation courses to train them to become Wildlife Crime Officers, but their stance on illegal hunting is not that firm.

And then there’s Dorset. Despite the culls and despite the cuts, Dorset’s Rural Crime Team is a winner.  Dorset has the smallest area (1024 square miles) with the most wildlife-trained officers.

Officers are encouraged to do wildlife training.  North Dorset’s PCs Mullins and Sugrue said that being a wildlife officer is “just one more hat to wear”, one more duty added to the workload, then added that what is encouraging is how many choose to do the training, and choose to stay with rural policing.  

Inspector Danny Thompson, head of the North Dorset rural team, when asked about the 25 wildlife-trained officers listed on their website, said: “I think we are up to 31 now.”

Freedom of information

In recent years two wildlife issues have been dominating the work of the North Dorset team – policing the badger culls and illegal hunting with hounds.  

They are determined to put a stop to illegal fox hunting, and are often seen monitoring the hunts in their area.  They take seriously residents’ complaints about hound faeces on village streets, and uncontrolled hounds running across busy roads.

Here’s something that really shows the thought that Dorset puts into wildlife policing. In 2015 the government held a consultation on changing the criteria for badger culling.  Among those organisations that responded were Gloucester, Avon & Somerset, Devon & Cornwall and Dorset police.  

Anna Dale, known for her Freedom of Information requests, and her refusal to accept DEFRA’s and Natural England’s ‘No’ answers, finally got a copy of the police responses. Most comments were about restricted budgets, too few officers and whether the proposed changes would make policing the culls less or more difficult.  

Could the police cope and would they be listened to?  A Devon and Cornwall response to a question on lengthening culling periods went so far as to ask “why not decriminalise the possession or taking of badgers in cull areas.”

Protecting badgers 

Of all the police comments, a Dorset officer was the only one to mention something that would protect badgers and remove them from the argument about bovine TB: “If there is a need to reduce the Policing footprint and reduce cost, I believe this can be achieved if DEFRA were to consider an extension of the vaccination (of badgers) process already in being in Dorset.  

“I would argue that while the NFU may be displeased, there would be reduced protest activity and confrontation.”

As I said, Dorset’s rural crime team is a winner.

This Author

Lesley Docksey is a freelance writer and has written on politics, war and peace, environmental issues and her great love, British wildlife.  Her work is published by various national and global outlets. 

The UK’s continued funding of a controversial chain of private schools in Africa is a sign of the fundamental flaws in its new approach to international aid, anti-poverty campaigners have said.

It comes a week after the Theresa May, the prime minister, signalled a major shift in that strategy during a trade delegation to South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria, based around greater private sector involvement in UK aid spending.

Global Justice Now has written to International Development Secretary Penny Mordaunt on behalf of a range of groups to call on the UK to halt funding for Bridge International Academies, which runs over 500 private schools in India, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, and Uganda.

Multiple failings

The schools have been criticised for their poor teaching methods including the use of invariable, scripted lessons to be read out from tablets.

The letter recounts a series of failings by Bridge documented by independent observers and media reports, as well as by governments since 2015, which include:

• Independent research showing BIA’s fees and practices exclude the poor and marginalised
• Repeatedly failing to respect the rule of law, including minimum education standards, over several years
• Poor labour conditions
• Reported concerns about freedom expression and lack of transparency
• Absence of valid evidence of Bridge’s positive impact
• Negative impacts on education quality, equity and social segregation and stratification

 

Universal education

Ed Lewis, aid campaigner at Global Justice Now, said: “The Prime Minister’s dance moves last week looked like they’d been taught at a Bridge Academies School. Rigid, inflexible and poor quality, these private schools are an embarrassment.

“How on earth did we get to a point where our aid spending has funded schools which two African countries are trying to shut down, and which have been criticised by UN human rights bodies?

“If this is what private sector involvement in aid means, the Prime Minister is dancing with disaster. The UK needs to use aid money to support free, quality, public and universal education and healthcare around the world.”

The letter is supported by civil society groups in Kenya, Uganda and Liberia. These include the Right to Education Initiative, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social & Cultural Rights,  East African Centre for Human Rights (EACHRights-Kenya), Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER-Uganda) and Coalition for Transparency and Accountability in Education (COTAE-Liberia).

The UK has funded BIA with over £20 million in direct and indirect funding.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from Global Justice Now. 

Santander has been forced to distance itself from a climate science denial conference after its logo was published on the event’s website without the bank’s knowledge.

The bank, which is one of the world’s biggest, told DeSmog UK it was not a sponsor of the climate science denial conference taking place in Porto, Portugal, at the end of this week.

However, Santander admitted giving money to the University of Porto, where the conference is being held, to “support investigation and research” but added that it did not oversee how the money was spent.

Official position

The conference, called “Basic science of a changing climate: How processes in the sun, atmosphere and ocean affect weather and climate” says it is “open to different opinions and interpretations of changing climate”.

Held at the University of Porto’s Faculty of Humanities, the conference has been organised by Maria Assunção Araújo, a professor at the geography department, who is due to address the conference on sea level rise in Portugal and ice retreat in Greenland.

Speakers include prominent climate science deniers Piers Corbyn, Philip Foster, Christopher Essex, Nils-Axel Mörner and Christopher Monckton, who will give the two-day conference closing speech before participants are invited to take part in a “cheese and port mingle”.

The conference also includes a session for students to ask speakers questions. Santander’s logo is featured on the conference’s website, alongside the University of Porto’s logo.

A spokesman for the Univeristy of Porto told DeSmog UK that the conference was not organised by the university despite being held on its premises and that views expressed at the conference “do not refelect the official position of the University of Porto about the subject”. 

Not aware

He added that the conference had been organised at the initiative of one of the faculty’s professors who applied to a programme sponsored by Santander aimed at supporting international events being held at the university. 

The spokesman said the programme “demands that such events exhibit the source of funding, which explains the presence of the Santander logo on the website”.

“It is our conviction that the universities should be a space of open debate and discussion, where the presentation of conflicting ideas and perspectives should be valued.

“We also believe that censorship of opinions — even the ones that we do not agree with — should not be part of the activities of any university and it is in this context that the University of Porto will host this conference,” he said, adding that this “does not conflict with the university’s commitment to figt against climate change”. 

In an email to DeSmog UK, Santander said it supported the University of Porto as part of its universities programme but that it was not aware that its logo had been used on the conference’s website.

Protect the environment

“Santander is not a sponsor of this conference,” a spokeswoman told DeSmog UK. “Santander has always and continues to do all it can to support sustainable growth and combat the impact of climate change, which is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges we face.”

She added that the money Santander gave the university could be used in any way the university saw fit.

“We do not instruct Porto University how to use funds it receives from Santander. It can use funding resources to support investigation and research at their sole discretion and decision, to respect the university’s academic independence,” she said.

In its climate change policy, Banco Santander — the parent company of the Santander group — states that “climate change and resource scarcity are two of the biggest challenges faced by society”.

It adds that the group’s efforts to protect the environment were based on the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change (UNFCCC) now re-branded as the UN Climate Change.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Energy independence has become a popular position in the United States recently. On both sides of the aisle, politicians are calling for increased domestic energy production and reduced importation of fuels like oil, which often come from places fraught with political tensions.

To be truly energy independent, the United States would need to produce enough energy to sustain the entirety of its population and industry. Such independence seemed like a far off goal not too long ago. However, innovations in sustainable energy and the recent shale gas boom have made the idea of an energy independent future seem more attainable.

As it seems more and more possible for the United States to achieve energy independence in the not-so-distant future, it’s important to remember that this process is complicated. Though it can be achieved in different ways to different effects, energy independence will require the US to radically re-envision the way it supplies and uses energy.

That being said, this article will consider how — and why — the United States and other countries might choose to become energy independent.

Eco-political Benefits

The United States is already a leader in the $6 trillion global energy market. Though the US imports about 20 percent of its energy, that number has been declining since new technology allowed for the extraction of shale oil and gas that was previously inaccessible.

The natural gas boom has freed up space in the American economy. Instead of purchasing barrels of oil from other countries, the US is able to supply more of its own needs, which allows money to be cycled more easily back into the American economy.

Seeing the impact that natural gas extracted from US territory made on the economy, many investors and politicians took notice and began advocating for energy independence. Indeed, the money to be made from natural gas amidst growing demand is one tempting reason to strive for energy independence.

Energy independence also boasts possible geopolitical benefits. The United States imports most of its energy from countries where political tensions run high. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, China and Russia are all huge exporters of energy, and this has put the United States in more than one awkward position over the years.

In addition to the amount of defense money spent protecting US oil interests abroad, relying on foreign oil has prevented the US and other countries from intervening in conflicts around the world. Europe’s lack of intervention when Russia annexed Crimea is just one example of energy stability influencing foreign policy decisions for the worse.

Energy independence could free the United States from fear of trade retaliation when making foreign policy decisions. This would make it easier for the US and other energy independent countries to boycott or otherwise intervene in unjust systems and governments.  It would also give other oil producers more claim over their own energy.

Environmental Sustainability

Though energy independence fueled by the recent natural gas boom may have economic and political benefits for the US, it could end up hurting the country’s chances at environmental sustainability in the long run. It’s important to remember that “energy independent” doesn’t always mean sustainable energy.

Though natural gas is somewhat cleaner than other sources of energy like coal, it is not renewable — eventually, like all other fossil fuels, its reserves will run out. Time-bomb energy like this does not equate to long term energy independence. At best, it would be a temporary solution to a long-term problem.

In order to battle climate change while working towards energy independence, the US must reduce demand for fossil fuels and invest in renewable energy sources such as wind, solar and hydropower.

A large-scale switch to this sort of energy would come with the same benefits as gas-fueled energy independence while also being cleaner and removing the need for transportation of heavy fuel across oceans and lowering risk of oil spills and other disasters.

Luckily, it is possible to make the US and other countries energy independent through use of renewable energy. Though it will require large investments in place of more established energy like oil and natural gas, renewable energy is the best way to ensure long-term energy stability at home and around the world.

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

To forestall the global collapse that now is well in train requires a total rethink. Fortunately, some excellent thinkers, doers and activists are on the case, as evidenced now by Food Sovereignty, Agroecology and Biocultural Diversity, edited by Michel Pimbert, director of Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience.

In particular, says Pimbert, we need to take seriously the traditional knowledge that is still manifest in Indigenous societies worldwide. This knowledge often proves to be factually accurate and is of great practical use – not least in agriculture, which we must get right.

The world needs small, low-input, complex and skills-intensive farms of the kind that are still the norm worldwide – more than 70 percent of farms are one hectare or less. Such farms are the world’s biggest employers and still feed most of the world’s people even though they have largely been forced onto the most difficult land. 

The world as a whole could gain enormously from their know-how, but the small farms are being swept aside as fast as big industry and governments, including here in the UK, can do the necessary deals and grab the land, while the farmers and their families head off for urban slums.

Longing to be with Nature

At least equally to the point, traditional ways of thinking are not rooted in the felt need to dominate Nature, or to increase personal wealth, as is de rigueur in the modern west. They are rooted in values – albeit values that may sometimes be difficult for westerners to appreciate.

Oxford University’s Nina Isabella Moeller describes an attempt by a German pharmaceutical company to persuade the Kichwa people of Ecuador to allow bio-prospecting – with of course shared profits, leading to wealth and modernity. The negotiations broke down. In the early meetings the Kichwa were simply bored – the men grabbed the opportunity to get drunk on free western booze. 

The trappings of modernity held no allure. What did appeal was a song that a woman made up on the spot that expressed her yearning to fly like a toucan.

This may simply sound bizarre – the kind of fantasising that brings out the cynic in western hard- heads. Yet it is not a million miles from the sentiments to be found in Coleridge and Blake: a longing to be with Nature, or again to be part of it. 

But although English Romanticism occupies a significant slice of conventional western education, it has very little influence on the strait-laced, “conventional” thinking that shapes economic and political strategy.

The power of intuition 

The cultural contrast runs deeper. For, says Moeller, when a Kichwa healer was asked how he acquired his knowledge of medicinal plants, he said that when his grandmother was sick the plants themselves came into the house and danced and told him what they could do and how they should be prepared. 

Such accounts reinforce the conventional western conviction that traditional peoples should be brought up to date for their own good – but we should surely be asking instead what such a story really implies.

To me it suggests that all human knowledge, the things we take to be true, rests ultimately on intuition; that intuition needs to be cultivated; and that the intuitions of peoples closer to a state of Nature may be far more refined than ours. 

In large part we have exchanged our intuitive powers for what Pimbert calls the “lens vision” of materialism and logical positivism: the conviction that nothing is worth taking seriously that we cannot stub our toes on and mathematicise. We have gained by this – antibiotics and IT – but how much have we lost along the way?

Flawed reasoning

Since the modern western paradigm is so obviously failing – threatening indeed to kill the whole world – we should ask, “How come?” Why have we, obsessively rational beings, allowed ourselves to be so led astray? Why do we put up with the status quo, which so obviously sells the world short and treats so many people, and other creatures, so cruelly? Why don’t we kick out the oligarchs who have brought the world to such a pass?

Gaëtan Vanloqueren and Philippe V. Baret provide at least part of the answer. The ideas that catch on in the world are not necessarily or even usually the ones that come closest to the truth or benefit the most people, but are rather those that enrich and empower the people who believe in them. 

So it was that in the early 1970s in agricultural circles agro-ecology and genetic en­gineering were taken equally seriously, as promising newcomers. Since then, genetic engineering has been vaunted in high places as the world’s saviour: the only possible source of the new crops and livestock that the world is deemed (erroneously) to need. 

The reasoning is flawed at every turn, and after nearly four decades of hugely expensive biotech research and development it is hard to find a single example of a GMO that is unequivocally good for humankind or for the biosphere.

Rethinking the world 

Yet, even though GM crops cannot yet be raised commercially in Europe, they are the prime focus of Britain’s agricultural research strategy. Agro-ecology, by contrast, receives hardly any support at all.

Agro-ecology imitates Nature: farms are treated as ecosystems, diverse and low-input, demonstrably sustainable and resilient, and, when properly supported, just as productive as the industrial kind, and certainly productive enough. 

Truly the world needs rethinking across the board. Truly the western post-Enlightenment paradigm needs to be challenged. As Vanloqueren and Baret acknowledge, we cannot simply “roll the clock back” but it is very foolish indeed to suppose that we have nothing to learn from traditional practices, or to assume a priori that “modern” western ways must be superior, or that the people who have adopted those ways are themselves superior and have a right to impose their will.

Food Sovereignty, Agroecology and Biocultural Diversity is essential reading for all who can see that the dominant paradigm has run its course. We need both to rethink, and to rethink the way that we think.

This Author 

Colin Tudge is co-founder of The College for Real Farming and Food Culture. His latest book is Six Steps Back to the Land (2016). This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist. Download a free sample copy of online.