Kesang Choedon has created an innovative organic and heritage food enterprise near Thimphu, the Bhutanese capital. Formerly a police officer, Choedon employs and trains 30 young women in processing and marketing of Bhutan’s local food treasures.

The enterprise includes the processing of nearly 150 different organic food ingredients from a wide range of local products including dried fruit and vegetables, cereals, pulses, health drinks, herb teas and spices. These products are sold in an organic shop, and offered in a Folk Heritage Restaurant in the capital.

Choedon is eager to further expand her facilities, products and training to young Bhutanese people. Her intention is to create and strengthen a new organic food movement that builds upon food traditions but also brings healthy and tasty food to Bhutanese people

Some people in Bhutan consider you as pioneer of a new food movement. Would you agree?

I am not sure whether I am a pioneer in the literal sense. The nature of my work led to working directly with farmers and the need to be supply our people with naturally grown good food. 

If Bhutan is to be turning toward 100 percent organic, then farmers, processors and consumers need to work together. Some may believe that our food is already organic, because most of our farmers do not use any chemicals or fertilizers. But in fact there is only a very small organic market and there is a risk that non-organic methods come sneaking in.

I consider my food business as an invitation to farmers to create their own organic market and as an invitation to consumers to value what we have in Bhutan: very nutritious and tasty local food.

You started your food business ten years ago to preserve and develop Bhutanese food culture. Was it difficult to find farmers who would work with you?

Not at all. The problem was getting started and getting the quantities right. Sometimes I would have far too much, sometimes far too little.

So I decided to dry food so that I would be able to balance what I received and what I could store – fruit, vegetables, pulses, cereals. That gave me time to find outlets. The shop helped and of course the restaurant.

There was no organic certification and control at that time. How could you trust that you got the quality you wanted?

I was relying on my own sense and the sense of friends who helped me to find farmers who were ready to cooperate.

Bhutan is a big family you know. And in the villages we keep an eye on each other. With the help of the government’s extension service we had quickly built up a group organizing and checking the buying up.

We have the Bhutanese organic certification now but I would like to say that certification may not be necessary for the local market (but would be necessary for exports). 

You were a police officer before you started your food business. Why did you leave your career in the civil service and go it alone?

I was very lucky to be one of the first women offered a career when the government decided to employ women in security services.

It was an exciting time. I love investigations. At that time, it was still an adventure to be officer in the countryside: no roads, no cars, walking in the mountains, crossing rivers at night, sleeping in cowsheds on farms in the forest and so on.

And it was already during that time that my sense for food had emerged from the food that we were offered at the farms. Then there was my grandmother’s food that was irresistibly good. Both, my grandmothers’ and our farmers’ food were the reasons that I dropped the job.

It was not an easy decision at all. I think it was the day when I had read some reviews about the bad image Bhutanese food has. I was suddenly sure that my passion for our own Bhutanese food was stronger than remaining in the police services.

I had no bad conscience that I would not properly serve my country any more – you know we feel very responsible in Bhutan to serve our country – I was just sure my service for our country would be to preserve our food.

You are passionate about drawing young people into a new food movement – you employ and train thirty young women. Is food still best taken care of by women?

I have only employed young women. Girls are in general more ambitious and innovative then men.

Women often do not find jobs when it comes to plumbing, fixing electrical lines and cement works, as they are risky and require physical strength. I focus on young women who are jobless for some reason, including school drop-outs. And I want them to understand how important and fascinating working with food is.

The girls in my staff stay with me between three to ten years. They like the teamwork and I encourage them to take their own projects and initiatives in hand and develop them further.

I always said to myself: if you feel like doing it, go for it, be your own master. My daughter and two nieces are managing the shop and the restaurant by the way. I believe women will do the job of bringing our local food and organic farming right into the center of Bhutanese culture.

You are building your business and your ambition for an organic food movement on food heritage and on food education. Do you also believe that a change of Bhutan’s farm and food policy could help to achieve the declared goal to become the first country in the world with 100 percent organic farming?

Policies can help, if the people carry them. We have the advantage that our King and our Government want to go that way. But people seem to believe that we are already there, and that is not the case.

Our subsistence farmers farm without chemicals but not necessarily organic. There are practices missing like crop rotation and good water management that make farming resilient on the long run.

But also consumers are not aware of how important it is that they choose local and seasonal food from Bhutan to support farmers in their effort to go organic.

Finally it is an educational job. We have to teach food culture at schools and talk more about it.   I was very lucky because I could tap into my grandmother’s vast cooking, preservation and food knowledge. She lived to 110 years old, so I had time to “absorb” her treasure of recipes and I could build upon that to develop my enterprise.

I am very keen to hand that on to my daughters and to the young people working with me. I believe our food culture is deeply linked also to our religion and our strong relation to nature.

We are doing a religious offering called “du-na-gu”, the nine cereal grains. They stand for common wealth, for diversity and for generosity, in a sense for what we get from nature and what we share. I have offered these nine cereal grains in my shop, and I teach people how to cook them. This is how we build upon tradition and move towards a healthy and sustainable future.

This Author 

Hannes Lorenzen is senior adviser to the Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development of the European Parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg.

The new national strategy to combat imported deforestation, released by the environment ministry on Wednesday, will use trade to help decouple economic development from tree-cutting and unsustainable agriculture in poorer countries.

France also plans to help companies meet their own goals for combatting the import of products linked to deforestation, and encourage financiers to take environmental and social issues into account for investment decisions.

Europe’s imports of agricultural products – ranging from beef and soybeans from Latin America, to palm oil from southeast Asia, to cocoa from Africa – are responsible for more than a third of deforestation, according to the French strategy.

Environmental laws

“The EU, a major global economic player, bears an important responsibility to set an example,” it stated. The European Union, as well as France, therefore should “rapidly” adopt measures to reduce the impact of their consumption on deforestation.

The European Commission is under growing pressure from some EU capitals, European Parliament members and civil society to address the bloc’s contribution to deforestation in other countries.

“The EU and others need to follow suit, because France can’t tackle deforestation alone,” Nicole Polsterer, campaigner at the Brussels-based environmental NGO Fern, said on Wednesday. “Only the European Commission can ensure that all member states’ trade is free from violations of land tenure rights and deforestation.”

France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, the UK, Denmark and Norway sent a letter to EU commissioners earlier this month asking them to come up with a bloc-wide action plan to combat deforestation, based on a feasibility study the commission published in March.

The French strategy also comes amid growing concern about rising deforestation in the world’s largest tropical rainforest – the Amazon – following Brazil’s election of Jair Bolsonaro. Deforestation in the Amazon jumped by nearly 50% during the three-month presidential election season, according to preliminary figures. The incoming president has talked about putting a highway through the forest and weaken environmental laws in favour of farmers and loggers.

Polsterer argued on Climate Home News during Brazil’s election campaign that the best way for the EU to resist Bolsonaro’s impact would be through trade. The EU is the largest foreign investor in Brazil and its second-largest trading partner, with a share of 18.3%, she said.

Forests shelter more than 75% of the world’s biodiversity, absorb climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions and help protect soil and freshwater, said the French strategy. Global forest cover shrunk by 129 million hectares, or twice the size of France, between 1990 and 2015, it said, citing the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

This Article

This Article first appeared on Climate Home.

A group of hard-Brexiters is working together to launch a “Museum of Communist Terror” with the aim to “keep alive knowledge and understanding of the deaths, terror and economic failure that took place under Communist regimes, primarily in the 20th century”.

Over the last month, individuals from high-profile and opaquely-funded organisations advancing free-market and libertarian ideology have joined the venture founded by journalist and writer James Bartholomew.

This included senior members of Vote Leave such as the campaign’s founder Daniel Hannan, who later founded the IFT (previously Institute for Free Trade), technology chief Thomas Borwick and head of social media Chloe Westley, now a campaign manager at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, which was founded by Vote Leave’s chief executive Matthew Elliott.

A historian

The group also includes Eamonn Butler, the co-founder and director of the Adam Smith Institute, another libertarian think tank which together with the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the IFT are part of a network of free-market organisations and climate science deniers pushing for a hard-Brexit.

DeSmog UK has extensively reported on this network which is based in and around 55 Tufton Street, an office near Westminster.

The office is also home to the climate science denial group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson.

Earlier this weekend, the Taxpayers’ Alliance conceded that it had coordinated with eight other organisations pushing for a hard-Brexit as part of their political campaign. The revelations came as the Taxpayers’ Alliance admitted to illegally sacking BeLeave whistleblower Shahmir Sanni for raising the alarm over Vote Leave’s electoral spending.

The nine groups include the TaxPayers’ Alliance, the Adam Smith Institute, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Leave Means Leave, Brexit Central, the IEA, the Centre for Policy Studies, Civitas and the office of former Ukip leader Peter Whittle.

Out of eight of the museum’s current directors, only one is a historian.

Activities and messaging

According to its website, the museum team is currently working to “acquire artefacts” from former Communist countries to create a collection and create one or more small museums “leading up to the development of a full-size museum in London”.

The museum’s message will also be disseminated through social media, films for schools and universities and “lobbying for improvements in the teaching of the history of Communist regimes”.

At time of publication, the museum’s website includes short videos of people sharing their life experience under communist regimes in Cambodia and eastern Europe.

The “Museum of Communist Terror” Twitter account is also followed by a number of climate science deniers and key members of the Tufton Street network, including Breitbart writer James Delingpole, MP Owen Paterson and coal baron Matt Ridley.

DeSmog UK contacted the museum for comment but it did not receive a response in time for publication.

Museum directors: Who’s Who?

The museum founder is James Bartholomew, a journalist for the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Spectator and the author of The Welfare of Nations, his second book which argues that welfare and nanny states are damaging prosperity.

Bartholomew registered a private limited company by guarantee named “Museum of Communist Terror”based in Bath with Companies House in September last year.

Writing in the Spectator in 2016, Bartholomew said he developed the idea of creating the museum after visiting the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary, a museum and memorial to the victims of the country’s fascist and communist regime of the 20th century.

Bartholomew wrote that “the generation that has grown up since the collapse of the Berlin Wall does not seem to understand the connection between communism and terror”, adding “the far left is experiencing a surge of popularity” across Britain and the US.

The museum’s website was created by Kanto Systems, a company which describes itself as a political campaign consultancy and whose founder and director is Thomas Borwick, Vote Leave’s former chief technology officer who previously worked for Cambridge Analytica.

Kanto Systems also built the website for the Save The 8th campaign in Ireland which opposed amending the constitution to legalise abortion.

Borwick is also tightly connected to former Ukip MP Douglas Carswell and together run a campaigns communication management company called Disruptive Analytica.

Borwick joined the museum company as a director last month, along with a number of new recruits.

Chloe Westley, a campaign manager for the TaxPayers’ Alliance – which was founded by Vote Leave chief executive Matthew Elliott – also joined the company last month.

Westley was head of social media for Vote Leave and founded the grassroot campaign “Change Britain” which aimed to deliver on the EU referendum result.

In the summer 2016, she also advised environmental minister Michael Gove during his Tory leadership campaign.

Daniel Hannan joined the “Museum of Communist terror” earlier this month. Hannan is a Conservative MEP for the South east of England, known for his hardline pro-Brexit views.

Last year, Hannan was a speaker at The Liberty Summit to discuss “the dark legacy of the communist system and the developments of post-communism”. The event was organised by the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe(ACRE), a European eurosceptic political movement.

Hannan made headlines in September last year when he launched the IFT (previously the Institute for Free Trade) at the Foreign Office, which was attended by international trade secretary Liam Fox and former foreign secretary Boris Johnson.

The IFT is based at 57 Tufton Street, sharing an office with the anti-renewables thinktank the Centre for Policy Studies, and next door to many of the organisations DeSmog UK previously revealed to be at the heart of a UK climate science denial network in 55 Tufton Street.

The IFT was set up after the Brexit referendum to promote free-trade deals between the UK and other countries. Earlier this year, the IFT engaged in “shadow trade talks” with a range of libertarian groups from the UK and the US to set-out what a US-UK trade deal could look like post-Brexit.

These talks resulted in the publication of an alternative Brexit plan, known as the “Plan A+”, which was largely produced by lobbyist Shanker Singham, director of the international trade unit at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).  

The plan called on the UK government to cut EU environmental regulations to secure free-trade deals with the US, China and India after Brexit, describing environmental protection as “frequently they are disguised methods of protectionism”. The plan was widely criticised by environmental groups.

Eamonn Butler is an economist and the co-founder and director of the Adam Smith Institute, another free-market organisation which is based at 55 Tufton Street.

Butler is strongly affiliated to the Atlas network.

In the 1970s, Butler worked in the US on pensions and welfare issues for the House of Representatives.

Giles Udy is a historian whose work has focused on the Soviet gulag system and its influence on the Labour movement in the UK. His latest book is called “Labour and the gulag”.

Roger Scruton, is a writer and philosopher who has long defended conservative values.

He came under scrutiny in 2002 after having written extensively about smoking, including for the IEA, without disclosing he was receiving regular donations from Japan Tobacco International.

Jean-Paul Floru is a writer and a senior research fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. He is a former conservative councillorat Westminster City Council and stood as a Conservative candidate in the 2009 European Parliament election.

He describes himself as a libertarian conservative, a “Boris [Johnson] backer” and a eurosceptic.

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Each morning at Camp Constitution’s summer camp, the kids and parents go off to classes while staff members do a room inspection. “What we look for is not just cleanliness, but a patriotic and Godly theme,” says camp director Hal Shurtleff in a video of the 2016 camp.

“We are looking for creativity — are they learning what we are teaching them?”

And what are they being taught? Conspiracy theories about the United Nations (UN) and how climate change is a hoax, and they’ve drafted in two of the world’s most notorious climate science denialists to do the job.

Pushing conspiracy

The rooms — named after “places of refuge in the old testament” — are covered with U.S. nationalistic garlands and flags. A “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) hat is perched on a wooden bunk post.

Children take quotes they’ve learned from classes, and turn them into posters. One encourages the United Nations to keep out.

Another lists “buzzwords” including CO2, climate change, environmental justice, and endangered species.

“You hear these buzzwords and you know the bad guys are behind the scenes,” says a commentating Shurtleff.

Shurtleff is a former regional director of the John Birch Society — the UN-hating, right-wing conservative group known for, among other things, pushing a conspiracy that the UN’s promotion of environmental sustainability was in fact a sinister plot to install a world government.

But as well as learning about the evils of sensible resource use, the kids at this summer’s Camp Constitution attended classes by climate science deniers Lord Christopher Monckton and Dr. Willie Soon.

World government

In an interview on conspiracy-loving Infowars, Shurtleff said how Soon had spoken to campers the previous year and would “bring his whole family” to the event at Lakeside Christian Camp and Conference Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

At the camp’s 2017 event, Soon gave a talk claiming that the sun was controlling the world’s climate, and dismissing the role of CO2. NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt has been among the scientists to carefully unpick Soon’s claims, describing his scientific contributions as “singularly poor.”

In 2018, the camp schedule shows Soon was to give two talks — one about the “climate change hoax” and another that attempted to undermine the measurements showing sea levels around the world are rising, and how that rise is accelerating.

Research from Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center has shown Soon’s work to be heavily funded by fossil fuel industry interests, including more than $1 million from ExxonMobil, Southern Company, American Petroleum Institute, and Charles G. Koch Foundation.

Also on the agenda was former John Birch Society president John “Jack” McManus, who told the youngsters, some who stay with their parents, how the U.S. should “Get Us Out of the United Nations” while explaining his full anti-UN “world government” conspiracy theory. He even sold them a booklet for the discounted price of $2.

Freedom of speech

Eccentric British climate science denier, Lord Christopher Monckton, was also at the camp to regale the kids with tales of how climate change science is one big con-job. 

Monckton has been claiming for about two years to have discovered a fatal flaw in climate science (the world’s temperature gauges and polar ice don’t seem to have gotten Monckton’s memo) and he did not spare the youngsters any detail with a slideshow chock full of formulas.

While Monckton might sound like he knows what he’s talking about, actual climate scientists have long-debunked his claims.

In 2015, scientists looked at one of his very few scientific papers to make it into the peer-reviewed literature and found it was “riddled with errors” — and published a response in the same journal.

Camp Constitution’s Facebook page shows Monckton sitting down for a meal with some of the young campers, perhaps to discuss the themes of liberty and freedom of speech.

You have to wonder if he told them about the various people he’s threatened to sue or have arrested (none of the threats ever seem to materialize) for saying or doing things he didn’t like.

All in the spirit of freedom, of course!

This Article

This article first appeared at Desmog.uk.

Attributing climate change to capitalism is hardly mainstream thinking, but it is also no longer taboo.

Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein certainly helped popularise this argument, but it is being echoed now in more unusual quarters. In August 2018, a group of Finnish scientists commissioned by UN Secretary General warned that the current economic system cannot address the multiple unfolding social and ecological crises.

The vice-chair of the world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, admitted earlier this year that in the face of climate change “We have to change capitalism. This is really what’s at stake here.”

Military spending 

It is clearly a welcome development that ever more people are connecting the dots between our economic system and ecological destruction. There is much less attention, however, to the links between environmental issues and militarism and security.

It’s a surprising omission given how much power the military has and the way it has increased its power dramatically over the last decades. When you consider that climate change will dramatically increase instability and insecurity, examining the role of the military in a climate-changed world becomes ever more critical.  

While politicians have proved unable to make the decisions necessary to stop worsening climate change, they have not found it difficult to find funding for ‘security’ needs.

Global military spending amounted to 1.74 trillion US dollars in 2017, equivalent to 230 US dollars for every person on earth – and almost double what it was at the end of the Cold War.

The events of 9/11 in particular fuelled an all-encompassing war against ‘terror’ and an almost limitless military spending spree. As governments spent more, they also reinforced the power and influence of military corporations (such as Lockheed Martin in the US and Elbit in Israel)  which now help draft and write worldwide security policies  from which they further profit. 

Growing market

Naomi Klein has drawn attention to the “epic case of historical bad timing” of the global neoliberal revolution gaining pace just when we needed corporate regulation and a planned transition to low-carbon economies.

I would argue that an equally important case of bad timing has been the massive growth of the military-security-industrial complex at the time climate change’s impacts have become more and more obvious. It will almost certainly lead to the military playing an ever more significant role in responding to climate change – with consequences for all of us. 

To understand the power of the military today, it is important to go beyond constantly growing budgets and never-ending wars – such as the now 17 year war in Afghanistan – and challenge the consensus it has created that supports ever more pervasive ‘security’.

The big arms firms today not only sell arms, they sell all varieties of ‘security’ solutions from CCTV cameras in urban neighbourhoods, to biometric databases for storing fingerprints, to high-tech radar systems at increasingly militarised borders.

This market has grown massively: a modest estimate suggests that the  global homeland security industry will be worth $418 billion by 2022.

Increasing criminalisation 

Some of the new security giants are perversely involved in both creating insecurity and providing the solutions to it.

A report by Transnational Institute in 2016 showed that three of the top European arms traders to North Africa and the Middle East – Finmecannica, Thales and Airbus – are also some of the principal winners of contracts to militarise EU borders. In other words, they profit twice – from fuelling the wars that lead to refugees and then providing the technology and infrastructures that stops refugees from finding safety.

It is therefore an artificial distinction to define militarism as only concerning wars abroad; it also concerns the increasingly militarised responses at home – those that initially target marginalised communities (Muslims, immigrants), then activists, then humanitarians and ultimately everyone.

This militarisation and accompanying criminalisation unfolds every day worldwide. In the UK for example, in 2015, 4,000 people were reported as potential extremists under a massive surveillance programme – more than a third of whom are children.

Both Black Lives Matter and Standing Rock protesters in the US have found themselves facing off against Mine-Resistant Armor-Protected vehicles as well as drones. In Honduras, more than 120 people were murdered between 2010 and 2016 by paramilitary groups for standing up against logging, mining and dams. 

Huge emissions 

The influential US media commentator and neoliberal advocate Thomas Friedman explained the reasons for this militarised response – and rather more honestly than you would expect: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

In other words, capitalism and militarism (particularly US imperialism) are not just parallel forces, they are inextricably intertwined.

What Friedman failed to draw attention to though is that the hidden fist is not just out there in the ‘world’, it is also at home too. 

The close links between capitalism and militarism can be seen in the operations of the US military.  Deploying most military assets today requires huge emissions of greenhouse gases, which means the Pentagon is the single largest organisational user of petroleum.

Just one of its jets, the B-52 Stratocruiser, consumes roughly 3,334 gallons per hour, about as much fuel as the average car driver uses in seven years. Despite its huge carbon ‘bootprint’, the military’s contribution is not even properly assessed by industrialised countries and remains exempt from the UN Paris agreement.

Strategic deployment 

Of course if their emissions were properly accounted for, we would be even further from meeting the goal of keeping global temperature rises under two degrees centigrade. 

Their role is even more significant if you you consider what most military forces are mobilised for – in particular the US’s vast military infrastructure of more than 800 bases and their navy and air fleets across the globe.

It’s clear that they are principally deployed in oil-rich and resource-rich regions and near strategic shipping lanes that keep our globalised economy humming.

This focus is not unique to the US. The research group Oil Change International calculates that up to half of all interstate wars since 1973 have been about oil. 

Police violence against populations is also often concerned with protecting fossil fuel projects, industries and infrastructures from resistance. We see it time and time again that environmental activists are faced with violence when they take on extractive industries.

Removing regulations

The human rights organisation Global Witness noted in 2015 that three people were killed each week defending their land, forests and rivers against extractive industries.

Capitalism’s hidden fist is not a new phenomenon – economic power has always used violence to protect itself – but it has also accelerated in recent decades.

One impetus was certainly the aftermath of 9/11 that legitimised a massive rise in military expenditure and state violence. But it is also likely that the broader ecological crisis has fuelled a military response. 

The Stockholm Resilience Center’s research shows that there are nine core ecological processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the earth on which we depend. Humanity has already crossed two boundaries related to biodiversity loss and shifts in nutrient cycles (nitrogen and phosphorus) and is in a perilous condition in terms of climate change and land use. 

Underpinned by a corporate ‘race to the bottom’ – in which transnationals constantly seek to remove regulations and costs that limit profit – it has led in particular to extractive industries crashing up against our ecological boundaries and moving into the last remaining territories free from exploitation.

First Nations

People are forced to resist, not just to prevent pollution or corruption, but in order to survive. Their fierce resistance has met with harsh repression.

Recent events in Canada bring this reality home. In 2013, energy corporation Kinder Morgan announced it would build a new pipeline from Alberta to British Colombia straight through an environmentally sensitive region and through the  territories of more than 100 ‘First Nations’.

The announcement led to massive resistance, so much so that the company eventually announced it would abandon the project due to the ‘legal risks’. Yet rather than back off from a toxic oil project, the state doubled down and ended up effectively nationalising the pipeline. 

A court case in August 2018 declared in the protesters’ favour– noting the lack of constitutional consultations with First Nations and the lack of environmental review of expanded marine tanker traffic in the Salish sea.

It is an important delay, but it is clear that a Canadian state dominated by oil interests is unlikely to back down – and will ultimately use force to impose the project. As they have in countless fossil-fuel and extractive projects around the world.

‘Declaration of war’

And those faced with the violence feel no alternative but to resist. As Kanahus Manuel of the Secwepemc Nation in Canada noted: “Everything flows from the land. If the land is destroyed, we are also destroyed.”

It’s understandable therefore that Manuel, along with a coalition of indigenous organisers, called the Canadian government’s actions a “declaration of war.” She added: “We mean it literally. The military will be called. It is the national pattern to use criminalization, civil action, and other penalties to repress Indigenous resistance to these policies by bringing to bear the weight of the law and police forces against Indigenous individuals and communities.”

As climate change impacts hit home ever harder, this tendency towards a militarised response is likely to grow. Trump may not believe in climate change, but his military does and they are already making plans to deal with its consequences.

The speed of melting in the Arctic led the US Navy this year to announce it is revising its strategy for the region with a likely increase in armed ships and troops.

This Author

Nick Buxton is a communications consultant, working on media, publications and online communications for TNI. He has been based in California since September 2008 and prior to that lived in Bolivia for four years, working as writer/web editor at Fundación Solón, a Bolivian organisation working on issues of trade, water, culture and historical memory.

Australia recently joined the European Union and US in declaring climate change a ‘security’ threat and warning of dangers of “migration, internal instability or intra-state insurgencies … terrorism or cross-border conflict” that would necessitate a “a wide spectrum of Defence responses”.

Militarising borders

When the military and security forces are the strongest and best-funded institutions in our society, we can’t be surprised when they become the default institutions for dealing with climate change impacts. 

The predominant US and EU state responses to refugees is one of the most disturbing portents of what militarised climate adaptation could look like.

The default response by rich industrialised nations to refugees has not been one of solidarity or compassion, but increasingly one of doing everything to keep refugees out – whether that is militarising borders, supporting dictators, holding refugees in concentration camps or forcing people to make journeys so treacherous that thousands die in the attempt.

It’s an abhorrent display of inhumanity, yet it is becoming the depressing norm. When we know that climate change impacts will only add to the pressures to migrate, the future looks very bleak.

The truth is that we have normalised state violence. We no longer see the CCTV cameras on our streets, the barbed wire fences on our borders, the armour on the police, the refugees in camps because they are no longer unusual. This normalisation means that there is a growing danger security solutions to climate change will not just be the default response but largely invisible too.

‘Shifting baselines’

Unravelling this consensus in favour of security rather than solidarity will not be easy.

One tool that could help is the concept ‘shifting baselines’ as it can help us understand this process and can give us clues as to how we might start to forge another path.

The ecologist Daniel Pauly came up with the term to refer to the way fishery scientists would base their ‘norm’ for healthy fisheries as the depleted state in which they first encountered them rather than the untouched state they were originally. Most scientists could no longer remember seas teeming with large fish so had accepted a depleted sea as normal. 

However one response to this in the fishing world has been to establish marine reserves. If done properly and protected from commercial trawlers (rather than small-scale fisherfolk) they can lead to dramatic recovery in marine wildlife and habitats. Most importantly, they unveil the dangers of over-fished seas and the potential for a different approach.

We need a similar approach to security – creating local and state examples of alternative approaches to militarisation. We need to show that militarising our response to social and ecological issues will merely exacerbate their impact on the most vulnerable.

Prioritising solidarity 

We also need to argue and mobilise against this militarisation of a society in whatever form it takes and demonstrate the potential for a different approach.  

This can take many forms, from climate adaptation plans that prioritise solidarity rather than security – such as those pushed for by the Transition Towns movement – to the network of cities supporting sanctuary for refugees, to the Black Lives Matter protesters seeking to hold police accountable in the US.

All such efforts can start to slow down the relentless march towards militarising our planet. Climate campaigners have started to slow down the fossil fuel machine, we need now to start throwing grit into the gears of the military-industrial-security complex.

This Author 

Nick Buxton is a communications consultant, working on media, publications and online communications for TNI. He has been based in California since September 2008 and prior to that lived in Bolivia for four years, working as writer/web editor at Fundación Solón, a Bolivian organisation working on issues of trade, water, culture and historical memory.

Martin Dorey’s No.More.Plastic. is short and highly readable – and well timed. It captures the wave of public interest and concern over plastic pollution in our seas and oceans that followed the BBC’s Blue Planet series.

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

The premise of the book is that ocean plastic pollution is a truly terrible thing and that to combat it we all need to cut right back on plastic – or, better still, get it out of our lives altogether.

In line with the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid), author Martin Dorey has assembled a series of two-minute solutions (#2minutesolution) that set out simple things we can do.

Two minutes

Among the solutions: don’t buy water in plastic bottles; instead, just have your own refillable bottle and fill it from the tap.

Avoid cotton-bud sticks with plastic shafts like the plague – along with plastic cutlery and drinking straws, disposable razors and lighters, plastic bags, and anything packaged in plastic. Not forgetting wet wipes (almost all of which are made of plastic fibres) and synthetic clothes, which can shed millions of tiny fibres every time they are washed, to make their way through the sewerage system into the sea.

But it’s not all avoiding and doing without. You can also lobby your MP to push the government to stronger and more effective action (in a #2minuteemail perhaps), do a #2minutelitterpick in your neighbourhood, or join in a #2minutebeachclean. And that’s something we can all find time to do, argues Dorey, as “two minutes is no time at all.”

This is all good, but where to start? How about last night when, out tidying up a local playing field, I stuffed a carrier bag full with scraps for landfill, and a bin liner with cans and bottles for recycling?

It was the work, not of two minutes, but of over an hour. In a few weeks’ time it will need doing all over again. And what good is a #2minutebeachclean if it takes an hour to drive to that beach? And what about all the fuel you burned getting there?

Shifting impact

Of course if everyone were to spend two minutes a day, or maybe better still an hour a month, cleaning up their local environment, the litter problem would be well and truly whacked. But sadly there’s little sign of that happening, at least where I live.

Ocean plastic is a terrible thing, but it’s not the only environmental bad. And using plastic can reduce envir­onmental damage caused by other materials and activities.

For example, if we simply replace plastic packaging with cardboard and paper, that’s going to drive the mass conversion of natural forests into plantations to supply all the extra wood fibre we would need, with huge CO2 emissions, wildlife losses and hydrological disruption.

Stop using synthetic clothing, and we will instantly create massive extra demand for cotton, which by most environmental measures is far worse than polyester or nylon.

For example, it takes over 20,000 litres of water to grow a kilogram of cotton – against 17 litres for a kilogram of polyester – together with intense applications of pesticide and fertiliser.

Sustainable vision

With typ­ical yields of about 500 kilograms of cotton per hectare, the world’s 25-million-tonne-a-year cotton crop is already taking up some 50 million hectares – three to four percent of the world’s 1.4 billion hectares of arable land. Producing cotton also emits about twice as much CO2 per kilo as producing polyester.

Of course, most of the advice in this book is sound. Yes, let’s ban the worst examples of single-use plastic, from polyester wet wipes to plastic straws!

Let’s tax plastic packaging, and put deposits on plastic bottles! And if it’s the oceans we’re truly worried about, let’s have more (regularly emptied) bins along our rivers, streams and beaches, and litter traps in rivers and estuaries!

But the truth is that ‘no more plastic’ is an unattainable ambition and in many ways an undesirable one, at least for now. We must be guided by a broader, longer-term vision of the sustainable future we need to create, one that accounts for all environmental costs and impacts, not just the most fashionable ones.

That will involve drastically reduced material consumption across the board, and a planned transition to a zero-waste society. Bring this off, and the plastic problem will have solved itself.

This Author

Oliver Tickell is a regular contributor to Resurgence & Ecologist and is the author of the report International Law and Marine Plastic Pollution: Holding Offenders Accountable. The latest edition of the magazine is out now!

Palm oil suppliers to the company behind popular brands Cadbury, Oreo and Ritz have destroyed 70,000 hectares of rainforest including 25,000 hectares of orangutan habitat in Indonesia in just two years, according to campaigners.

New mapping analysis by Greenpeace International has revealed that between 2015 and 2017, suppliers to Mondelēz cleared over 70,000 hectares of rainforest, an area bigger than the city of Chicago, where the company is based.

The company pledged in 2010 to achieve zero net deforestation by 2020, along with other members of the Consumer Goods Forum, which represents manufacturers and retailers of consumer goods such as food and toiletries. It also adopted a “no deforestation, no peat, no exploitation” policy in 2014.

Traceability

Mondelēz gets much of its palm oil from Wilmar International, which in turn sources more than 80 percent of the ingredient from third party suppliers. It also has a no deforestation policy, yet still fails to monitor its suppliers to check if they are complying or not, according to the analysis by Greenpeace.

Kiki Taufik, head of Greenpeace Southeast Asia’s Indonesia forests campaign, said: “Palm oil can be made without destroying forests, yet our investigation discovered that Mondelēz suppliers are still trashing forests and wrecking orangutan habitat, pushing these beautiful and intelligent creatures to the brink of extinction. They’re literally dying for a biscuit.”

The report comes as an advert by supermarket Iceland to raise awareness of the environmental destruction caused by palm oil went viral on social media after being banned by regulators.

A spokesman for Mondelēz said that it had been working with its supply chain to improve traceability. “We’re asking our direct suppliers to call on their upstream suppliers to map and monitor the plantations where oil is grown so we can drive further traceability. We’re also excluding 12 companies from our supply chain as a result of breaches,” he said.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She was formerly the deputy editor of the Environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

Environmental campaigners have succeeded in taking out a private prosecution against a coal mining company over the alleged destruction of a newt habitat.

Banks Group is accused of wildlife crime for allegedly destroying the breeding and resting places of protected Great Crested Newts on the controversial Bradley opencast coal site in County Durham.

Solicitors acting on behalf of Campaign to Protect Pont Valley have been informed that a court summons will shortly be issued to Banks Group to attend a hearing on 12th December at Peterlee Magistrates Court.

Protected species

This comes as Banks Group await the verdict from the High Court on their appeal to start another new opencast coal mine at Druridge Bay in Northumberland.

Great Crested Newts are a European Protected Species and as such destroying their breeding and resting places is a criminal offence under regulation 43 of The Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations 2017.

Solicitor Neil Connell, of Singleton Winn Connell said: “In my opinion there is clearly a prima facie case for Banks Group to answer.” Connell is the solicitor instructed in this case.

In August, Judge Cousins of Teeside Magistrates Court expressed doubt over the legality of the actions of Banks Group regarding the Brooms pond on the Bradley opencast.

She said: “I cannot be satisfied to the criminal standard that Banks would not have committed, be committing, or be about to commit an offence contrary to the Conservation and Habitat of Species Regulations.” 

Judge Cousins’ verdict was issued in the trial of protesters who had been taken to court for peacefully protesting to stop the opencast coal mine from starting.

Legal challenge

During the case the Great Crested Newt Mitigation Guidelines were examined. Judge Cousins said: “There is no doubt in my mind that those standards were not followed” by Mr Lupton of Argus Ecology. 

UK Coal – which had originally secured the planning permission on the site – laid out plans to translocate newts to purpose built ponds to the north of the site. Banks Group alleged there were no newts and therefore claimed they did not need to comply with the procedures to protect the animals.

Campaigners allege that Durham Constabulary – which does not have wildlife crime officers – has refused to fully investigate the actions of the opencast company.

Anne Harris for Campaign to Protect Pont Valley said: “Durham Police force have inexplicably refused to properly investigate the major wildlife crime that happened here in plain sight, choosing instead to arrest people protecting the environment. We are left with no choice but to take Banks Group to court ourselves.”

Don Kent, the from the Campaign to Protect Pont Valley, said: “It’s a very important and fundamental part of our society that the wealthy, both companies and individuals, are not able to escape their obligations under the law.”

Campaign to Protect Pont Valley is currently crowdfunding to raise the money needed to bring Banks Group to justice.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Coal Action. 

The government has resumed its quarterly survey of public attitudes to fracking and shale gas. The latest results show support for fracking stands at 15 percent, down three percentage points, and opposition at 31 percent, down one point.

The previous Wave tracker survey, published in August 2018, dropped questions, for the first time since 2013, on whether people supported or opposed fracking.

At the time, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) said the questions would be asked only annually in future to allow space for “more focused questions” on subjects such as consumer issues or employment rights.

Support and opposition

But BEIS explained last week why the questions had been reinstated. “With the UK entering a new era of shale gas exploration it is only right that we routinely gauge the opinion of the British public and so the questions on supporting/opposing shale gas development will return to each quarter of the tracker,” a spokesperson said.

The fieldwork for the latest results was carried out before a series of earth tremors linked to Cuadrilla’s fracking at Preston New Road near Blackpool.

It found that 15 percent of those surveyed said they supported fracking, the second lowest level recorded since the question was first asked nearly five years ago.

The latest figure was down three percentage points on the result for March-April 2018 when the question was most recently asked. It was up on the record low of 13 percent a year ago.  Strong support for fracking remained unchanged at two percent.

The gap between support and opposition has returned to the level last seen in summer and winter 2017.

Common reasons

BEIS said men were more likely to support fracking than women: 20 percent compared with 10 percent. Other groups more likely to support fracking were:

People aged 65 and over (20 percent) compared with people aged 16-24 (11 percent).

People with household incomes of £50,000 (21 percent) compared with people with household incomes up to £16,000 (15 percent).

People living in the East Midlands (21 percent) compared with people living in Northern Ireland (6 percent).

The most common reasons to support fracking were:

• The need to use all available energy sources (36 percent)
• Reduce dependence on other fossil fuels (25 percent, down from 31 percent)
• Good for local jobs and investment (23 percent, up from 19 percent)
• Reduce dependence on other countries for energy (23 percent, down from 36 percent)
• Cheaper energy bills (17 percent, down from 26 percent)

Community benefits and the shale wealth fund were among the least common reasons to support fracking (4 percent and 1 percent).

Knew a lot

A total of 31 percent of participants opposed fracking. This was down just one percentage point on March-April 2018 when the question was most recently asked and down from the record high of 36 percent a year ago. But opposition to fracking has remained about 30 percent since March 2016.

Strong opposition was down 1 percentage point to 12 percent.

The survey found that people in social grade AB were more likely to oppose fracking than people in social grade DE: 39 percent compared with 25 percent.

Geographically, the people most likely to oppose fracking, according to the survey, were those living in Wales(41 percent), the North West (38 percent) and Scotland (36 percent).

People who said they knew a lot about fracking were more likely to oppose than support (58 percent compared 24 percent).

Opposing fracking

The most common reason for opposing fracking were:

• Loss or destruction of natural environment (58 percent, up from 57 percent)
• Not a safe process (27 percent, down from 29 percent)
• Risk of earthquakes (26 percent, down from 29 percent)
• Too much risk and uncertainty (25 percent, down from 28 percent)
• Risk of contamination to water supplies (25 percent down from 31 percent)

 

Half those surveyed said they neither supported nor opposed fracking, the highest recorded by the survey so far. This was up slightly on the 47 percent when the question was most recently asked (March-April 2018).

The main reason for neither support nor opposing fracking was a lack of knowledge about it (77 percent).

Just four percent said they did not know whether they supported nor opposed, unchanged on the survey when this was last asked.

Awareness

As many as 75 percent of people said they were aware of fracking. This is down slightly on the 78 percent recorded in the most recent survey and in September 2017.

Moreover, 11 percent said they knew a lot about fracking, 45 percent said they knew a little and 19 percent were aware but did not really know what it was. 25 percent said they had never heard of fracking.

BEIS said the awareness was higher among people aged 65 and above (86 percent) than in 16-24 year olds (56 percent). It was also higher among people in social grade AB (87 percent) than among people in social grade DE (61 percent).

Awareness was also higher among people with household incomes of £50,000 and over (89 percent, compared with 70 percent among people with household incomes up to £16,000).

People living in the north west and Wales had higher level of awareness (83 percent) and those living in London (56 percent).

Widening gap

A spokesman for Frack Free Lancashire said: “The widening gap between opposition and support is hardly surprising and neither is the fact that more than twice as many oppose shale gas as support it.

“This polling clearly shows that acceptance of the industry’s claims for shale gas benefits is vanishing even amongst their supporters.

“Support for the idea amongst those backing fracking that shale gas might lead to a reduction in dependence on other countries for UK’s energy supply has collapsed from 36 percent in March to just 23 percent in September.

“Similar falls can be seen for the claims that shale gas will reduce dependence on other fossil fuels (25 percent compared to a previous 31 percent), with the same story for the claim that fracking may result in cheaper energy bills (17 percent compared to a previous 26 percent).

“It would appear that people are at last seeing through the industry’s spin, and once the impact of the recent earthquakes and the IPCC’s warnings regarding climate change filter through we would expect the gap between opposition and support to widen again.”

The fieldwork was carried out from 19-30 September 2018 on the Kantar TNS Omnibus. The results of the Wave 27 tracker are based on face-to-face home interviews conducted with a representative sample of UK adults aged 16+. The sample size, of 4,258, was more than double that used when questions about attitudes to shale gas were previously asked (March-April 2018).

This Article

This article appeared at Desmog.uk.

The UK trade department is refusing to release any analysis of the economic benefits of a post-Brexit US trade deal, saying it is still a “work in progress”.

Trade secretary, Liam Fox, claimed in July last year that analysis by his department suggested that bilateral US-UK trade could rise by £40bn a year by 2030 “if we’re able to remove the barriers to trade that we have.”

But responding to a freedom of information request by Unearthed, the Department for International Trade (DIT) said it could not disclose its economic modelling on the grounds that “there is limited public benefit in releasing analysis that is not complete”.

Dropping regulations

It added that the department will not publish its analysis of the impacts of a potential US trade deal until after Britain has left the EU.

Shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner criticised the department’s refusal to publish its assessment.

“The Secretary of State is not driven by economic logic but by ideological dogma,” Gardiner said. “This is why he refuses to publish any official analysis done by the department.”

“Fox talks about increasing trade with the USA by removing barriers. But these so-called barriers include our food safety standards, environmental regulations and animal welfare laws like the ban on chlorine washed chickens, hormone injected beef and genetically modified foods,” he continued.

The US commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, has warned that any deal will be contingent on the UK dropping EU regulations, such as its ban on imports of chlorinated chicken.

The analysis being withheld by DIT could help clarify the extent to which the benefits from any trade deal would be dependent on removing such regulations.

Conflicting assessments

The news comes as Theresa May prepares for a major showdown with the Eurosceptics in her cabinet, who are expected to be asked to approve a draft Brexit deal with the EU this week.

The ability to freely negotiate trade deals with the US and other major economies has been central to the argument of many Brexiteers that the UK would be better off outside the EU customs union.

They contend that the UK needs to be able to scrap EU regulations in order to strike trade deals with countries like the US, something that would not be possible as part of a close customs arrangement.  

In a major speech in February, Fox was emphatic in arguing that remaining in a customs union with the EU would not be worth the UK losing the opportunity to freely negotiate its own trade deals.

Similarly, former foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, said in May that the “massive opportunity” of a US trade deal would only be possible if Britain escaped the regulatory “lunar pull” of Brussels.

Always wrong

But in January an internal government analysis of the impacts of exiting the EU was leaked to BuzzFeed, which found negligible benefits to the UK’s GDP from trade deals with the US and other major economies.

According to the assessment, a trade deal with the US would add between 0.1 to 0.3% to UK GDP in the long-term.

The costs of reduced EU market access would far outweigh the benefits of new trade deals though, the analysis says.   

The paper was disowned by then Brexit minister Steve Baker, who said that it “does not yet take account of the opportunities of leaving the EU”, adding that civil service forecasts were “always wrong, and wrong for good reasons”

During an undercover Unearthed investigation earlier this year, claims surfaced that Fox had turned to the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a right-wing think tank, to ask if they could provide him with an analysis of the GDP benefits of a US trade deal.

Bypassing officials

Speaking to an undercover reporter in June, the IEA’s director general, Mark Littlewood, said: “I went to see Fox a few weeks ago and… he actually said, ‘Look, there are five things that my department hasn’t researched and I bloody well need somebody to come up with the answers here, because I think it will show great opportunities, you know. Nobody’s yet shown how much a US-UK free trade deal could add to GDP, could you guys go and work that out?’”

Littlewood continued: “So we’ve gone back and said yeah we’ll work that out, and so ultimately for some of our research, if the audience is one person, namely the cabinet minister and [he is] likely to do something with it, fantastic”.

DIT meeting logs show that Littlewood met with Fox on 5 February 2018, sources at the DIT said the department has not commissioned research on this subject from the think tank.

A spokeswoman for the IEA said they could not confirm the contents of the recordings without being provided them, however they added:

“IEA representatives will happily meet with any ministers, MPs, policymakers and stakeholders of all stripes and persuasions who wish to speak to us about our ideas and research. Because of the quality of our research, we are asked by policymakers of all kinds for our thoughts and advice on relevant subject areas. We regard this as an indication of the successful pursuit of our mission.”

‘Quick and dirty’

“It would be extraordinary for a think tank to decline these kinds of requests. Whether the policymakers in question take up our ideas is down to them,” she continued.  

A DIT spokesman said: “We are committed to an inclusive and transparent approach to trade negotiations and are currently analysing responses to our consultation, which many businesses, interest groups and members of the public took part in.”

“As previously set out, the Government will publish its approach to new Free Trade Agreements before negotiations begin,” he continued.

According to Gardiner: “Liam Fox is dressing up his Atlantic Bridge agenda as trade policy, and using it to pursue a quick and dirty trade deal with the USA.”

This Article

This article first appeared at Unearthed, from Greenpeace.