Two billion tonnes of waste are produced annually, making it a real danger to our planet. This figure is expected to grow to four billion by 2100

Schemes and initiatives have been introduced to encourage recycling, but most of our waste continues to end up on landfill sites.

Waste is not only deposited in landfills and buried deep underground; some of it ends up in our oceans illegally. According to some studies, 1.4 billion pounds of rubbish ends up in our waters each year, severely impacting marine life — so much so, scientists have estimated that the amount of plastic will outweigh the fish by 2050.

Sustainable products 

Ninety-nine percent of the items we purchase are disposed of within a six-month period. Because of this, more businesses around the world are looking at more sustainable ways to create their products in a bid to help better the world that we live in. 

Here, Traidcraft – producers of fair trade food & drink, gifts and handmade Christmas decorations – take a look at businesses that are channelling their creativity into waste reduction methods.

Recycled tableware 

Ngwenya Glass has been producing quality glassware since 1979. Originally set up as a Swedish Aid Project, Ngwenya Glass now trains over 60 people in the art of glassblowing to create one-of-a-kind pieces of ethical homeware.

Every day, Ngwenya Glass prove that a commitment to protecting the environment can exist hand in hand with commercial success. All products are handcrafted from 100 percent recycled glass, sourced from throughout Eswatini by local people.

Ngwenya Glass encourages communities to come together for clean-up days along main roads in the area to gather discarded glass. Most of the glass used to be soft drink bottles!

Ngwenya Glass pay these glass-gatherers by the kilo, while empowering them to conserve their environment, too.

The business also works with local schools to educate young people in the importance of environmentalism and recycling, and supports schools with building materials and learning resources.

Wasteboards

Wasteboards are a company that create traditional skateboards with an eco-friendly element, in a bid to reduce waste within Amsterdam. Research has suggested that there are 20,000 plastic bottles  bought every second, this forward-thinking company collect plastic bottle tops to create the deck of the board. 

Wasteboards also believe in helping out the local community and encourage people to collect bottle tops from a range of events to ensure they can continue the development of unique skateboards. As well as this, fishermen who use the canals in Amsterdam are also asked to collect as much as they can. 

One part of the appeal is that each board is handmade and moulded into a design that creates an aesthetically pleasing product. This company loves the idea of being sustainable and being able to sell a sustainable product, so even if your wasteboard breaks — they’ll recycle the broken plastic and create you a new one!

Re-Kånken and Eco-Shell

British consumers have already latched onto the Kånken bag. Originating from a small town in Sweden, the company focuses on outdoor clothing and equipment and is committed to making nature more accessible for adventurers alike while having a focus on the simplicity of their products. 

Although they pride themselves on simplicity, the crafting of the bag is much more complex. To play their part in helping the environment, they released the Re-Kånken bag which is made entirely from polyester recycled from plastic bottles. As well as this, it is dyed with SpinDye technology which ‘radically reduces’ the amount of water, energy and chemicals used.

The Eco-Shell is another product from Fjällräven that avoids using materials that harm the environment. Eco-Shell is also made from recycled polyester and unlike many other products on the market, perflourinated chemicals are not involved in the creation. 

Lush cosmetics

Renowned as one of the eco-friendliest high street brands in the UK, it’s no surprise that Lush Cosmetics take their place on this esteemed list.

Lush claim to be 100% vegetarian, promote ethical buying, fight animal testing, craft their products by hand and offer naked packaging products which is helping reduce the chaotic packaging crisis Britain is now facing.

According to some figures, each person uses around 200 pounds of plastic a year — 60 pounds of which is thrown away instantly. This has highlighted a huge problem and put great responsibility upon businesses internationally and through innovative design, Lush Cosmetics were able to develop several products that didn’t require packaging to sell.

From shower gels to shampoos, there are plenty of naked products available. As well as this, all of plastic used by Lush is 100 percent recycled. 

Thinking creatively 

These are only a few of the many businesses trying to play their part in helping the environment.

This proves that the ability to be creative and think outside of the box can truly have admirable benefits that help both people and planet. Could you get more creative with your waste? 

This Author 

Jo Lambert is a Digital Marketing Manager at Traidcraft, a company specializing in a wide range of organic, hand made and fair trade products from food and drink to clothing and gifts.

“The web of life is being torn apart,” declared author and environmental campaigner Tony Juniper.

The IPCC report launched in October 2018 declared that we have 12 years to acton climate change, and the WWF recently published its latest Living Planet Report.

Since the 1970 baseline year – i.e. in less than one human lifetime – animal populations have dropped by 60 percent. 

Living systems

I listened to Juniper and the Devon Wildlife Trust speak about the reality we face, and what the UK might do about it. “What is causing this destruction? – three major things,” Juniper declared. 

First, our food system. We use vast areas of land to grow crops to feed animals and ultimately the growing global middle class. If the top two billion consumers cut down meat and dairy consumption by just 40 percent it would free up an area of land twice the size of India. 

Second, deforestation and land use. Juniper said: “We forget that the Romans deforested much of our land. Our wildlife persisted until after the end of World War 2”. Then our agricultural system intensified. It’s not just habitat change, it’s system change and intensification that’s destroying wildlife. 

Third, the fragmentation of our habitats. We’ve divided up land into fields, roads, airports. Wildlife can no longer move freely. And yet in the latest UK budget, £30 billion of funding was found for road infrastructure just weeks after the IPCC’s warning.  

“This is all an assault on the fabric of living systems,” Juniper said, matter-of-factly. “It’s supposedly the price of progress – we need to keep prices down, to increase our competitiveness. But you can’t do good business on a planet that’s in chaos.” 

Environment Act 

So, where do we go? Will we nurture a low tax, free trade zone when we leave the EU, and push the natural world down the agenda? Or will we choose to step up and lead? 

The UK’s major wildlife groups are uniting to make the case for a new Environment Act – it would be the first since the 1995 Act. They’re calling for clear and measurable goals including: 

– The creation of an environmental watchdog to hold the government to account, once the European Commission no longer does so. 

– A legal duty to restore nature, backed by targets that are enshrined by law. For example, targets to restore air and water quality, and increase native woodland and bird populations. The UK is lucky to have an army of citizen scientists who can help with this. 

– Access to high quality green spaces for everyone. This would also improve our public health, reducing the burden on the NHS. 

– Sustainable supply chains. The UK currently imports produce from land equivalent to half the size of the UK, and from countries where deforestation is an issue. 

These points may sound familiar – they’re already in the government’s 25-year Environment Plan and subsequent announcement of an Environment Act. But the plan is voluntary, and the Act could be thrown into disarray with a no-deal Brexit. It needs to be moved forward into law, and that’s what the push for an Environment Act aims to do. 

Rare opportunity 

The 2020 Beijing Convention on Biological Diversity will offer an opportunity to globally prioritise the natural world. It’s an opportunity to “bend the curve of loss into a curve of recovery,” according to Juniper. “A treaty will need to ensure that nature’s vital signs are improving by 2030.” 

Beijing 2020 could result in the biodiversity equivalent of 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, Juniper explains. By the time that Paris meeting happened, the UK was already leading – our Climate Act had come into place in 2008. This showed that it was possible for a country to turn aspiration into policy and generate momentum. The Climate Act prepared the ground for the Paris Agreement.

W have an equivalent story here – an Environment Act that gets passed into law and in turn inspires global leadership at the Beijing Convention is our best opportunity to change things in a generation. It could help us step into a truly green economy. 

Restoring balance

We need to recover. But we cannot bring back species and habitats when we do not care for what we already have. On a local scale – my Devon home turf – only one third of the 200 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) here are in good condition, according to Harry Barton, Chief Executive of the Devon Wildlife Trust. 

How can we care for our local patch? We can manage our verges and gardens less to encourage wildlife habitats and corridors. We can make sure there is accessible nature in every city, town, and community.

We can contact our MPs and local companies and speak to them about the Environment Act. We can connect with and support local farmers. 76 percent of land in Devon is farmed – if more of this was run by nature-friendly farms, we’d better look after the pollinators and soil that we all depend on. 

The local, national and international are all vital if we are to prioritise and restore the natural world. And ultimately, progress on climate change goes hand-in-hand with the restoration and protection of our natural world, too.

Wildlife, humans and the climate that sustains us all are mutually dependent. Creating a new UK Environment Act could show the world how we might prioritise, restore and protect this balance.   

This Author

Elizabeth Wainwright is a contributing editor for The Ecologist and a freelance writer. She also co-leads Arukah Network. You can find her on Twitter @LizWainwright

If you’re in Devon, you can learn more about what the Wildlife Trust is calling for by clicking here.

I recently accompanied Rohit Naniwadekar and Monali Mhaskar from the Nature Conservation Foundation on a survey for Rufous-Necked Hornbills in Upper Siang, Arunachal Pradesh.

They wanted to assess the status of the Hornbills’ population and the feasibility of a Conservation Program in the area, so we were out to walk trails in the forest and to interview experienced hunters from the village. 

Towards the end of my time with them – having walked nearly 40 km of forest paths – we’d gotten but a single momentary glimpse of one individual Hornbill. It had called from the bare branches of a tree sticking out above the canopy. While its loud KOKK… KOKK… still resonated in our ears, it flew up a side valley and out of sight.

Sombre evening

Even without preliminary analysis, we could tell that the numbers in Siang were far less than the density estimate: one bird for every two square kilometres for community forests in Eastern Arunachal Pradesh – to say nothing of the seven birds per square kilometres for protected areas like Namdapha Tiger Reserve.

Our extremely poor encounter rate was validated by the locals as well. Every time Rohit introduced us and stated the purpose of our visit, he’d be cut short by the locals saying that we wouldn’t find Hornbills near the villages: “You’ll have to sleep a night in the forest […] They used to be found closer, but not anymore.”

Then in one of the villages we saw the head of a young female Hornbill (pictured above), killed a day and a half’s walk away from the village. It still carried the smell of rotting meat.

It was a sombre evening at the end of a tiring day and we sat talking to the village Gamburas (Headmen) while the head dried in the smoke over the kitchen fire. It was surprising how little, for a hunting community, they seemed to know about the Hornbill’s ecology.

“They’re seasonal visitors”, we were sometimes told. But Rohit was convinced, given how good the forest is, that at some point there must’ve been sizable resident populations migrating locally, and our interviews confirmed this. The older men remembered times when the birds were more common and could be seen closer to the villages.

Collective action

Rohit asked them politely, with all due courtesy: “Given their dwindling numbers, do you ever talk amongst yourselves about whether your kids will ever see them in the wild? That your children might have to go to a zoo in Assam to see the state bird of Arunachal Pradesh?” 

What makes tragedies so poignant is that they’re theoretically preventable, and yet overwhelmingly inevitable. Individually, we know what needs to be done, and yet the momentum of collective action seems too great for any one person to be able to stop it.

“Yes, I guess we must do something”, they said. For over the last few generations they’ve seen Malayan Giant squirrels disappearing with the coming of air guns; porcupines, with the arrival of flashlights.

We spoke to to Anirban Datta-Roy of the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, who worked in Siang valley studying the hunting and farming practices here. We discovered that there are indeed precedents of successful action against hunting.

Take fishing, for instance. When blasting and rampant use of nets led to dwindling of the catch at the annual fishing ceremony – during which the whole village go out to fish together – a number of villages banned their use, restricting fishing to angling and the use of traditional traps.

Traditional knowledge

And there is the example of Karko village. One of the largest villages in the valley, with nearly 180 households, they have officially banned hunting through the year – imposing a fine even on the carrying of a gun. They have a good catch during the week of the annual village hunt at the beginning of winter.

Hunting has been the way of life for the Adis of Siang valley for as long as they can remember, though traditionally they hunted using traps and with bows and arrows. Their love for the forest clearly shows through.

More than one young man told us: “Once we go into the forest, we just don’t feel like coming back. It is so beautiful in there.” And nothing I had ever seen can match their love for meat. How else can you explain a wholehearted relish of dishes of smoked meat boiled with just salt?

But what of the traditional knowledge that went with this love for the hunt? As encounters with the birds became rarer, it seemed that the birds had slowly lost their dignity in the minds of the hunters, their lore forgotten, their identity reduced to the amount of meat described by hands held apart in a circle, thumb to thumb, fore fingers touching.

Finally an old man, his face wrinkled with age, who had never himself seen a Hornbill nest, told us about the stories that his father had told him when he was a child about the birds’ elaborate courtship. The male woos the females with gifts of fruits, cajoling her to incarcerate herself into their nesting hole.

Once she squeezes in, the female begins to close the mouth of the hole with her faeces – made sticky from eating figs – leaving only a small slit. Soon she lays two eggs and the male then continues to feed her and the two chicks, bringing them hundreds of fruits every day, and the occasional treat of a poached fledgling, a hunted lizard or a squirrel that he’s managed to capture. 

Labours of love

The old man said: “They keep their nest hole very clean, defecating out of the slit and throwing out any seeds that they regurgitate. There thus rises a dense growth of sapling under the nest tree.

“When the saplings are this tall” – he said, holding his hand palm down by his knee – “they’d know that the chicks were fully grown.” Yes, nodded Rohit, all this is well documented and studied at length for the Great and the Wreathed Hornbill in other places in Arunachal Pradesh, the Western Ghats, as well as in Thailand.

In about four months, the chicks are ready to leave the nest – four months, during which the male continues to forage for the family. Then, their labour of love finally done, the female will emerge from the nest and slowly over the next day or so, the parents will together coax the chicks to leave the nest. 

But the old man had more to say. “When the saplings are this tall, then the hunter would climb up and get two, sometimes three, fully grown birds.” 

No animal can withstand that kind of hunting, where every young one as well as any breeding female is taken.

Younger generations

Hornbills are unusually vulnerable to hunting. Individuals in captivity have been known to survive to the age of 40, and they don’t start breeding until the age of three or four. Add to that the high mortality rates for Hornbill chicks, with only one of the two surviving the first year and picture becomes even more dismal.  

We were often told: “But these mountains have a world full of forests on them, and we hunt only on our own trails.” One could try to believe that there were indeed safe havens hidden amongst the folds of the tortuous ridges, in which the birds could live without fear, nest at peace.

But as we travelled down the valley, we soon realized that every section of every slope has its owner, every mountain has been spoken for, every ridge, walked.

Another question were were often asked was: “So are you here to ask us to stop hunting”. Rohit would honestly reply: “Not at all. That is your way of life; these are your forests; who are we outsiders to tell you how to live your life? We’re here to merely gather information that you will have access to, to make informed decisions about how to keep your forests well stocked.”

We had heard about people who hunted despite the village council’s ban in Karko. An official order to stop hunting, implemented by outsiders, is never going to work here. It is for the people themselves, nudged along by the more thoughtful ones amongst them, and the well-read and widely travelled younger generation, to tackle the question of collective action. 

Living sustainably 

It is proof of thoughtful policies – and a matter of much pride for the Adi community – that they have access to one of the largest expanses of contiguous forest in the country.

For once in history, the owners of the forest also have all the resources of the modern world at their disposal to come up with an answer to certain fundamental questions about what it means to live sustainably and in harmony with nature. 

The answer that they come up with will be a crucial one, for it will also implicitly tell us what the extinction of a species means to a community, and what it means to protect the essence of one’s traditional way of life. For what would it mean to be a hunter when there’s nothing left to hunt?

This Author 

Sartaj Ghuman is a freelance biologist, writer and artist based in India. 

The Unist’ot’en clan, members of the Wet’suwet’en Nation, built their family home in 2010 on the GPS coordinates of a projected pipeline. Since then, their occupation has flourished. It is now home to a traditional pit-house, a permaculture garden, a solar powered mini-grid and a healing lodge.

To date, no pipeline work has been done on their unceded territory. The re-occupation of their lands is in the path of several proposed pipeline projects, including the Pacific Trails Pipeline, the Enbridge pipeline, and the Coastal Link Gas Pipeline.

Contractors attempting to gain access have been turned away at a checkpoint by peaceful land defenders. The Unist’ot’en are reimagining free, prior, and informed consent, and, in-so-doing, re-establishing themselves in their ancestral lands.

Colonial violence

On November 27th, the land defenders of the Unist’ot’en camp were served an injunction and civil lawsuit by TransCanada, the company behind the Coastal Gas Link pipeline project. The injunction, which asks the RCMP to arrest and remove all people from the camp as soon as next week, will be heard in a BC court on Monday, December 10, International Human Rights Day.

TransCanada is seeking an “interim, interlocutory or permanent injunction,” police enforcement, and financial charges against those “occupying, obstructing, blocking, physically impeding or delaying access” to Wet´sewet´en territory.

The notice doesn’t name the Unist’ot’en house group and hereditary chiefs, who collectively hold title and govern Unist’ot’en territory according to Wet’suwet’en law. Instead, it’s directed at and aims to criminalize two individuals: Freda Huson and Warner Naziel. According to Smogelgem, Hereditary Chief of the Laksamshu Clan, “this as an attempt to individualise, demobilise, and criminalise us in order to bulldoze through our home.”

The camp´s press release declares that “the Unist’ot’en Camp is not a blockade, a protest, or a demonstration – it is a permanent, non-violent occupation of Unist’ot’en territory, established to protect our homelands from illegal industrial encroachments and to preserve a space for our community to heal from the violence of colonization.

We see TransCanada’s legal threat, which requests that the RCMP enter our territory by force, as a direct challenge to the safety of our residents and an extension of the colonial violence from which we are trying to heal.”

Violations of law

Pushing pipelines through on sovereign territory without free, prior and informed consent violates both Canadian law and international law. The Wet´sewet´en, along with the Gitxsan, were plaintiffs in the ground-breaking Deglamuukw-Gisday’wa court case, which recognized that Wet’suwet’en rights and title have never been extinguished across 22,000 km2 of northern British Columbia.

This aboriginal title includes the right to use, manage, and possess land, and to decide how the land will be used. With the 1997 Delgamuukw-Gisday’wa case, the Gitxsan and Wetsuwet’en demanded recognition of their unextinguished jurisdiction over the land based on the fact that they had never signed any land treaties with the governments of Canada and therefore that they had never ceded title to their traditional territories.

The supreme court acknowledged that in the absence of a ratified treaty and having never been conquered in war, the Gitxsan and Wetsuwet’en thus retained title and jurisdiction over their land, according to Canadian law. Despite this ruling, the Canadian federal and provincial governments continue to push through industrial and extractive projects without consent.

Pre-election Trudeau expressed a mandate based on a renewed national “nation-to-nation relationship, based on recognition, rights, respect, co-operation, and partnership” with First Nations in Canada. 

Trudeau also pledged that his government would “fully adopt and work to implement” the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which included the provision that “Indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for the development or use of their lands or territories and other resources.”

Global attack

Yet the dream has been slowly dying ever since. Instead the current government has abandoned its duty to informed consent under UNDRIP and requires only “duty to consult and accommodate.” The government´s failure to respect internationally recognized indigenous rights and to trod over them by pushing through projects such as Kinder Morgan represents a serious betrayal to indigenous peoples in Canada.

Another significant outcome of the Delgamuukw case was that, for the first time, the Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en were able to use their oral histories as principal evidence in the case to demonstrate their long-time use, occupation, possession, and administration of the contested land and their deep and enduring social, cultural, and historical connections to their territory. Their system of hereditary governance is enacted through the feast system, where stories, songs, and crests, lands and ranks are passed from one generation to the next, renewing the sacred connection that they have with their lands.

The jurisdiction and authority of the hereditary chiefs and the feast system recognized by the Deglamuukw-Gisday’wa court case is currently being ignored by Trans-Canada. According to Huson, “All Wet’suwet’en Clans have rejected the pipeline because our medicines, our food, and our water are all here and not replaceable.”

Further, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples protects Indigenous right to self-determination, including Article 10, which stipulates that “Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories.”

The litigation against the peaceful non-violent resistance of the camp can be seen as part of a global attack on Indigenous peoples and a colonial history of criminalization. According to Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, “The rapid expansion of development projects on indigenous lands without their consent is driving a global crisis. These attacks – whether physical or legal – are an attempt to silence Indigenous Peoples voicing their opposition to projects that threaten their livelihoods and cultures.”

A space for healing

The Unist’ot’en are defending their land and the sacred waters of the Talbits Kwah (Gosnell Creek) and Wedzin Kwah (Morice River), where salmon spawn. But their visionary struggle also goes further. Asserting their jurisdiction over unceded territory has come along with a process of healing the land and themselves. Through practicing food sovereignty, traditional medicine, and local energy production, and re-establishing a system of governance based on the matriarchal hereditary clan and feast system.

The healing lodge, built in 2015 in the path of the Coastal GasLink pipeline, has become the focus of the camp. Its focus is to provide support for those in the community suffering from substance abuse and trauma. More broadly, it was envisioned as a way to heal historical trauma from colonial and extractivist violence that so many First Nations in Canada suffer from and which projects such as the Trans-Canada pipeline continue.

According to Freda Huson, the need for the healing camp emerged from seeing so many indigenous people come out to Unist’ot’en land and finding it to be healing experience, to live on the land and have a connection with the natural world and our teachings. “It is a chance to return to some of our traditional teachings and land-based wellness practices of our ancestors.”

Dr. Karla Tait, Unist’ot’en Healing Centre Programmer, said: “Our people have been impacted by intergenerational trauma, and disconnected from those practices. Our clan discussed this dream of a healing centre that would be land based, with all of the programming stemming from our teachings and our ancestral ways of wellness that are much more holistic and that recognise the impacts of colonisation and of trauma on our youth and our families and communities.

“The projects proposed to run through our territory as a threat to us reclaiming and self-determining our own health and wellness.” Currently the lodge is home to Wet’suwet’en community members who are receiving holistic and land-based treatment for substance abuse.

Fracked gas

The TransCanada Coastal GasLink pipeline will run approximately 670 kilometres across Northern B.C, bringing fracked gas from Dawson´s creek to Kitimat. It is part of a recently-approved $40 billion fracked gas project, LNG Canada, the single largest private sector investment in Canadian history.

LNG Canada is a fracked gas processing facility run by five companies, of which Royal Dutch Shell is a 40 percent owner.  The impacts of fracking have been well documented, including the use of vast amounts of groundwater and up to 750 chemicals used to break up shale formations to release the trapped gas. Fracking is a major source of methane, leaked during production, one of the most potent greenhouses.

According to author and activist Harsha Walia, “It’s shameful that the NDP provincial government has announced tax breaks for LNG and is working with the federal government to push fracking throughout BC.

The biggest driver of climate change in the province over the coming decades will be from the LNG industry and the Alberta’s tar sands is the top consumer of fracked gas in Canada, accounting for one-quarter of the fracked gas used.”

The government would violently evict the Unist´ot´en at its own peril. The camp has become a powerful symbol against extractivism and for indigenous sovereignty and decolonization in practice across Canada and beyond.

Enacting responsibility

Their perspective of asserting responsibilities to the land and to rather than demanding rights from a government that pays lip service to reconciliation but that refuses to abide by the decisions of its own apex court of justice has created a space where they have been able to reinstate their own governance systems, and their own legal understandings.

Freda said: “The land is not separate from us. The land sustains us. And if we don’t take care of her, she won’t be able to sustain us, and we as a generation of people will die.”

While the Enbridge and Kinder Morgan pipelines generated heated opposition from many of the Indigenous territories whose lands they would cross, opposition to “natural” gas pipelines has generally been more muted.

This is because communities are told that in case of a spill the gas would simply evaporate. In contrast, the position of the Unist’ot’en camp transcends concerns for impacts on their territory alone.

The Wet´sewet´en hereditary chiefs have adopted a more holistic perspective, one founded on their relationship with the territory and with affected communities all along the commodity chain, from those suffering water pollution from fracking at the commodity frontier of extraction, to the coastal communities resisting export terminals and tanker traffic, to communities in island states impacted by the rising waters.

Affected communities

This positioning and their complete opposition to all pipelines – existing, proposed or approved to expand – means the camp has wide support. “We always have to be mindful that we are the first people of the headwaters,” Huson says. “This water hits us first; it’s our duty that we’re not making decisions that are going to impact clans downstream from us.”

Communities across Canada have already begun responding to the Unist´ot´en call for support.

Protests will be held across Canada in the coming days as a show of strength of support, and as of Wed. December 5th, over sixty-five organizations and 1527 individuals have pledged support to the Unist’ot’en Camp.

Numerous supporters have also pledged to travel to the camp to defend the Unistoten home if need be. What is clear from these pipeline politics is that Indigenous nations are not backing down and have pledged to continue to resist extractivist projects and colonial incursions into their unceded homelands.  

The Wedzin Kwa may be the next touching down point battleground between extractivist development and a  global movement for climate and environmental justice. 

This Author

Leah Temper is the author of Blocking pipelines, unsettling environmental justice: from rights of nature to responsibility to territory, Local Environment.

Resources:

A syllabus that gathers resources, facts, and videos so that educators are able to spread the word about Unist’ot’en Camp.

https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/teaching-unistoten/

Corridors of Resistance: Stopping Oil and Gas Pipelines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDR1l_Xw7ts

Leah Temper (2018): Blocking pipelines, unsettling environmental justice: from rights of nature to responsibility to territory, Local Environment, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2018.1536698

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13549839.2018.1536698?journalCode=cloe20

Letter of support: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdNtxbSahBWHsa9Wy_sEelq8BAEp1mOsiiOzkvq9dE7ryMnGA/viewform?fbclid=IwAR2w54zj5sB_sPkA5uKO5PBLgLDe5xqJG6oT_B4RkmKMmfKNuIIRRZTI524

EJatlas case: https://ejatlas.org/conflict/unistoten-camp-v-the-ptp-pipeline-bc-canada

His Holiness the Gyalwang Drukpa, respected spiritual leader and environmentalist of the Himalayan region, inaugurated COP24 by criticising materialism and reinforcing our duties to the coming generations.

His Holiness gave his speech at the Action Hub – the centre prized by the conference to showcase initiatives taken around the world to halt climate change in line with the Paris Agreement guidelines. He focussed on our global society’s misdirected sense of progress and success, which he highlighted needed to be reengineered. 

Under capitalism, people are taught from birth that they should seek happiness and a wellbeing in material accumulation. In such a world, environmental destruction is unsurprising. 

Paradigm shift

Built on a foundation of spiraling accumulation for accumulation’s sake, the continuous pursuit of profit on a planet of limited resources will never satisfy us. In fact, that’s the point: “We say it is like drinking salt water. It will only make you thirstier. It is an endless pursuit until death.”

The speech emphasised that to truly halt climate change we need to change where we look for happiness. This will cut our economic structure at its root, prioritising our relationships with each other and valorising our connection to nature.

A move away from what we want, to what we need; from a sole focus on the individual, towards the greater good. His Holiness centered that such a redirection of our society that is required existentially for our species is to be realised in the moral education we give to children since infancy, shaping their behaviors and lifestyle. 

The ecological destruction of our planet’s rich biodiversity for the latest gadget, shiniest jewelry, biggest house etc. could be curbed by changes in the mindset of everyone from parents to policy leaders. 

Economic pressures

However, such a reassessment will be difficult for those deeply embedded in our unequal economic structure.

Under the pressure of debt, unemployment, rising living costs and family dependency, the struggle to survive ties our immediate loyalty to what puts food on the table for our children today, even at the expense of our grandchildren. 

According to the Gyalwang Drukpa, this mentality is understandable – but it also centres unduly on the individual, flouts responsibility and deprives empathy. 

Many indigenous spiritual leaders – such as the Iroquois, who emphasise each generation’s obligation to take care of the land for the next 7 generations – take a similarly long view.

Interconnected world

Although we might focus on our immediate desires, each part of the world’s ecosystem is deeply reliant on and connected the others. This is especially so in the Gyalwang Drukpa’s home, the Himalayas, which has suffered increasingly dangerous floods created and exacerbated by unsustainable practices in the West. 

Ringing all the alarm bells possible, His Holiness Gyalwang Drukpa’s speech is part of a growing and outspoken spiritual sector that is realising the urgency of our obligation to preserve life – evident in the Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, brought forth at the United Nations Permanent Forum for Indigenous Peoples in April. 

This burgeoning group argues that saving ourselves requires a reformation of our relationship with nature and with one another, if we are to truly get a chance of implementing the Paris Agreement guidelines. 

This Author 

Temo Dias is a journalist and researcher in East Asian political affairs, environmental issues and governmental corruption. 

A reinvigorated climate justice movement saw more than 3-4,000 campaigners march through central London last weekend. The protesters brought a message of increasing urgency for decisive action to the doors of No. 10.

The annual march took place on the back of the Extinction Rebellion day of action on 17 November, and the two incontrovertible reports from the IPCC and the World Meteorological Organisation. 

Asad Rehman summed up the general mood with a fiery speech outside the Polish Embassy, deliberately chosen as the meeting point to coincide with the COP24, UN climate talks kicking off in Katowice.

Fiery speech

“You don’t need to be a climate scientist to see there is something very wrong with the planet. All you need to do is listen to people on the frontline in the global south,” said the executive director of the charity War on Want. 

“Just a one degree of warming and we see killer floods, droughts – we’ve seen famine, we’ve seen super typhoons and hurricanes, millions of people losing their homes and their livelihoods and while the death toll continues to go up and up we have to ask ourselves when climate scientists tell us we are in Decade Zero. 

“Why haven’t we made progress when we’re heading for not 1.5, not 2 degrees, but anything up 5 to 7 degrees warming?

“It’s because we’re in system that says that black and brown and poor people can be sacrificed for profit. Some people at the climate talks used to say to me ‘you’re too radical we have to live within the system we have to work within the system’ and I say to them that’s easy when you’re not dying from that system.”

Social justice

He added: “Keep the fossil fuels in the ground yes, but also let’s bring energy to the one and a half billion people in the world who don’t have energy. 

“We have to take on the agro-business that rack up huge profit while people go hungry, it means taking on the corporations that are cutting down the forests. Our big challenge is to connect our fight in this country to our fight globally. 

“Just a mile down the road is the City of London where our banks and corporations are driving climate injustice. We need a vision of the world which is fairer and we have that, we have the solution to the climate crisis. 

“What we lack is power and to build – we need to build a powerful movement and that means everybody here has to recognise that we have to go home after today’s march and connect our fight with the fight for social justice.”

International pressure

Speaking about the Amazon rainforest and the global south, Beatriz Ratton, from Brazilian Women Against Fascism said: “Bolsonaro’s government wants to open protected areas to economic interests and reduce environment agencies’ relevance. 

“This follows all the previous work to reduce deforestation which was reduced by 80 percent between 2005-12. He’s also merged the ministry of farming with the ministry of environment, which will now be clearly in favour of the farming industry.

“The Brazilian government withdrew the offer to host the next UN climate conference, while threats to the Amazon risk the rights to indigenous people. 

“Bolosnaro recently said he won’t recognise one more centimetre of indigenous land and will reduce the size and even undo indigenous territories that are officially recognised. If he enacts this threat he’ll destroy entire unique and vibrant peoples who rely totally on their land. 

“We need to act now by demanding there is international pressure as well sanctions should the government not adhere to committing to fighting climate change.”

Creative movement

Anna Gretton from Extinction Rebellion said: “Arrests are a very small part of our activity. Most of our efforts are going on behind the scenes – there is role for everyone in our movement. 

“We need to see everyone coming together, it really is now or never – the environmental movement has got to be bold creative and imaginative we need to use all the tactics in the tool box and ultimately none of us know if this will work but we can but try.”

Other speakers included Clive Lewis MP, Labour Party; Sian Berry, co-leader, Green Party; Richard Roberts, fracking direct action campaigner whose recent prison sentence was overturned; Paul Allen, Zero Carbon Britain; Nita Sanghera, Vice President, UCU; Neil Keveren, No 3rd Runway Coalition; Barry Gardiner MP, Labour Party; Liz Hutchins, Friends of the Earth; Peter Allen, Frack Free United; Claire James, Campaign against Climate Change.

This Author

Jan Goodey is a regular contributor to The Ecologist.

Treating soil less ‘violently’ and moving away from a ‘one-solution-fits-all’ approach to agriculture could help ensure food production can continue for future generations.

That was the message from Guy Singh-Watson, the Riverford founder and organic farmer, who has released a video ‘rant’ to mark World Soil Day 2018 and encourage people to care about the health of the soil. 

He said: “We’ve got 7.5 billion people on this planet, and we’re going to have 11 billion before too long. We are going to have to cultivate the soil. But we have to look after it better than we have done so it’s there for future generations as well.” 

Mixed systems

Farming is inherently damaging to the soil, through ploughing that disrupts the structure and ecosystems within the soil, as well as adding artificial chemicals that kill biodiversity and beneficial bacteria.

Guy continued: “We turn it over, we put the bugs that like to be on the top on the bottom, we expose the stuff that’s on the bottom to the sunshine. We drive over it with 10-tonne tractors and squeeze the life out of it. The way we treat the soil is a violent act.”

Moving to a more ecological way of farming, with more diversity and mixed farming systems, adding organic matter such as compost to the soil, and using perennial crops that don’t require re-cultivating every year, will all help soils recover. 

He continued: “We’ve got to get away from a one-solution-fits-all approach to agriculture. We’ve got to get a lot smarter and not just plough because we can, or apply pesticides because we can, and take a more ecological approach to looking after our soils. We’ve got to look after these soils, or they’re not going to produce anything at all.”

World Soil Day is an annual awareness event coordinated by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and participated in by people and organisations all over the world through events, and on social media under the hashtag #worldsoilday and #stopsoilpollution.

This Author

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

If millions of farmers, businesses, consumers, and all governments act together, it will be possible to feed a growing global population while reducing carbon emissions, according to research from US-based environmental think tank the World Resources Institute (WRI).

The report highlights the challenge of feeding the world’s population over the next 30 years.

As the global population grows from seven billion in 2010 to a projected 9.8 billion in 2050, and incomes grow across the developing world, overall food demand is on course to increase by more than 50 percent, and demand for animal-based foods by nearly 70 percent, it states.

Shifting diets

If today’s production levels were to remain constant during that time, then feeding the planet would lead to the clearing of most of the world’s remaining forests, wiping out thousands more species, and releasing enough greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) to exceed the 1.5°C and 2°C warming targets enshrined in the Paris Agreement, even if emissions from all other human activities were entirely eliminated, researchers found.

“Simultaneously feeding a more populous world, fostering development and poverty reduction, and mitigating climate change and other environmental damage, presents a set of deeply intertwined challenges,” the WRI states.

However, researchers believe that the scope for potential solutions to these issues is often underestimated. The report outlines a menu of options that could lead to a sustainable food future.

These include raising efficiency of production; managing demand by reducing food waste and shifting diets towards plant-based foods; and reducing GHGs from sources such as nitrogen fertilisers and energy use.

Finally, the WRI recommends speeding up technological innovations that have already been demonstrated in several areas, including additives that reduce methane emissions from rice and cattle, solar-based processes for making fertilisers, organic sprays that preserve food for longer, and plant-based beef substitutes.

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. 

The Godfrey Review is an internal Defra review of the department’s own 2014 bovine tuberculosis (bTB) eradication strategy.

It was led by Oxford University’s food and farming guru Prof Charles Godfray and four co-workers. Three of these – Professors Christl Donnelly, Glyn Hewinson and James Wood – have for many years been significant cogs in the mechanism of government bTB veterinary research.  

Michael Gove was appointed Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in June last year (2017)  and expectations of a bTB review arose that autumn. The review was finally commissioned in February 2018, perhaps timed so that it could not influence an accelerated badger culling this year. 

Biological issues

The review was controversial for two reasons. Firstly, it was largely undertaken by familiar faces contractually obliged on the subject via various government income streams. 

Secondly, its wording was initially restrictive, having been specifically instructed not to re-visit the rationale for current interventions. It was to ‘’take a prospective and not a retrospective view’’, and not to be a review of badger culling. 

The main bovine biological issues addressed within the Godfray review can be divided into four main areas: ‘Surveillance and Diagnostics in Cattle’ (chapter 3); ‘The Disease in Cattle: Vaccination and Resistance’ (Chapter 4); ‘Cattle Movements and Risk-based Trading’ (Chapter 5); and ‘The Disease in Wildlife’ (Chapter 6). There is no chapter bringing everything together. 

Despite the constraints, the report is a little more discursive than reviews of the past. More circumspect than John Krebs’ 1997 review, that was accused of trying to use ‘’the rhetoric of authoritative science to […] resolve a chronic policy problem.’’ 

Instead the review weaves between the facts and uncertainties and the Randomised Badger Culling Trials (RBCT) Independent Specialist Group (ISG) report of 2007. 

Hidden hints 

The review harbours both a range of hidden hints and a stark warning. 

As bTB takes England’s beef and dairy industries by the throat, the failing 2011 government policy and 2014 strategy now meet the austere shadow of Brexit, and the consequent potential for withdrawal of the funding needed to tackle bTB. 

Such matters blow like a cold wind through the 136 page review. It is a stark warning to cattle farmers on the ground and the industries that exploit them.

The message to the farmer is that you are going to have to do better. Anytime soon you may be paying for the cost of this problem via insurance policies and reporting to a new authority. 

Disease in wildlife

One of the major disappointments of the review is that it mis-characterises the wildlife issue as a moral impasse between those who follow the RBCT science and believe badgers must be culled, and those who believe they should not be killed under any circumstances. 

This is a worrying gross simplification and one has to ask how the review teams ‘fifth man’ – sociologist Michael Winter from Exeter – can possibly have come up with such a superficial dichotomy. 

Given that the ISG study group said that badger culling could offer ‘no meaningful contribution’ to bovine TB control, from 2011 most badger cull objectors (over 80 percent of the public and over 95 percent of scientists) just follow the government’s appointed RBCT expert scientists’ recommendation. 

In fact, most informed objectors also recognised that the unstoppable spread of bTB is down to rapid daily cattle movements (for which EU vets constantly ridicule UK) and misuse of the SICCT (tuberculin skin) bTB herd test. 

Once these have been adequately addressed, it is quite likely that bTB levels in deer and badgers etc would reduce without wildlife intervention. 

Suspicious modelling 

There is a peculiarity too in the text’s suggestion that bovine TB epidemiologists all agree that badger culling is necessary, when most wildlife and disease epidemiologists and other scientists are suspicious of the variously modelled ‘evidence’ or its efficacy in applied situations. 

Even a High Court judge in August this year chided Defra and ruled that Supplementary Culling could not be seen as ‘necessary’ as Defra had described it.

Charles Godfray is, in fact, the Oxford scientist whose 2013 published evidence review was effectively the last green light to commencing the current badger culls. His paper, with others, backed up extensive previous work from the Oxford University ‘stables’ who conceived much of the RBCT and its interpretation.

He was following on from Krebs and Anderson before him – who also received establishment honours. As can happen, the available data (costing around fifty million pound) becomes the scientific justification and new truth.

It is very difficult for Oxford to be queried, and even more difficult for it to be wrong. This is despite the concerns that the ‘evidence’ is fraught with problems surrounding uncontrolled randomisation and wider suspicion that some kind of policy-based science is in play.

Godfray unsprung

The 2018 Godfray review does, however, make reference to interesting and important prevailing opinions that flag up why the current situation with badger culling is totally unacceptable. And why dramatic change in the approaches to bTB eradication is coming. 

There is a need to better understand what might look like innocent statements, such as “There is no scientific consensus about whether the disease is self-sustaining in badgers’’, and (if badger is in fact a spillover host as opposed to a maintenance host) that badger culling or vaccination “control measures are helpful but not essential”.

These uncertainties cut helpfully right across the review’s Terms of Reference. Such biological uncertainty alerts savvy stakeholders to the possibility that they have been misled over the importance of badger measures. 

The logical policy development from these statements would be that, until the bovine testing is properly in hand, there is little point in interventions with wild animals. After all, no country in the world has shown that anything other than rigorous cattle-based measures can tackle bovine TB in cattle successfully. 

Badger vaccination

The uncertainty of the role of badgers in bTB may be one reason why the Godfray review gives a subtle yet dispiriting outlook on badger vaccination, softened only by suggesting that further research might help. The current scientific understanding of the ability to detect background levels of bTB in badgers is barely mentioned.

The Dual Path Platform (DPP) blood test to detect bTB in badgers is not all that helpful, as the Test Trap Remove trial project on chronic bTB herds in Wales is showing. False negatives and positives hinder precision in its application. 

Badger vaccination may be good for protecting badgers in areas yet to be infected, or areas that are patchily infected, and may help foster positive relationships between farmer and public, whilst culling brings only division.  

The Godfray message seems to be that badger vaccination may, as with culling, be able to slightly influence bTB prevalence and incidence but may be irrelevant to bTB trends if cattle measures are not working and sufficient.

This may be why the government has given vaccination only token financial support. In its real-world context, the Godfray review discreetly plays down vaccination as a serious tool in the box. It is all the more surprising then that the review retains it as a potential option for research. 

The final message seems to be: try anything you like with wildlife, culling or vaccination; the real problem is in cattle and until that is dealt with, it doesn’t really matter. Which is where the review actually hits the mark.

Mammals and methodologies

It is slightly frustrating however that in focussing on badgers in a review that wasn’t supposed to, Godfray dismisses the role of wildlife other than badgers in bTB, with no critical evaluation of why. He does this on the basis of old research that, with the availability of new technology needs repeating. 

Such research failed to look for non-visible lesions in other common mammals, where recent research suggests bTB may be prevalent. It is not clear whether this is just a remit too far for the committee which lacked a specialist wildlife epidemiologist, or simply because they know cattle measures are the key to halting the epidemic. 

Also interesting are the suggestions of ‘rowing-back’ on Supplementary Culling (keeping culling after a four-year cull) by reinstating the ‘cull and stop’ methodology of the RBCT, which after all is the agreed science reference point. 

This approach from the 2011 culling policy was jettisoned in 2017 by the Chief Vet and Chief Scientist, just because the cull companies (in the consultation process) simply had ‘no appetite’ to cull four years and repeat after a five year gap. 

Defra found a way to justify permanent badger depletion based on some kind of commitment to ‘learn and adapt’ according to outcomes. However, the cull roll-outs are not designed such that the success of any single intervention may be determined. 

Crisis continues

Godfray suggests an experiment to look for differences between culling and vaccination after a two-year post-cull cessation. It is strange to see how this fits with the earlier determinations. As an alternative to government’s scientifically unsubstantiated ‘keep culling badgers until bTB is absent in cattle’ thinking, the ‘cull then stop’ approach might be considered scientifically more logical than recent government policy. 

This is not least because Godfray review (& RBCT/ISG) member Christl Donnelly, with others, found the modelled bTB reduction from culling occurred only once culling had stopped. 

But Godfray’s suggestions do not pay deference to the needs for such an experiment to be surrounded by safe experimental parameters, so he is actually playing the government’s game here raising false hopes at adaptive learning. It all looks a bit wishy washy. 

These suggestions are however, something of a distraction from the main matter in hand – dealing with bTB in cattle. The value of Godfray’s review has been limited by being directed not to comment on the tangled data row surrounding Gloucestershire and Somerset Pilot culls.  

It has been claimed that Gove, Eustice and Coffey have misled both the public and Parliament since the Brunton/APHA reports in September 2017 and recently over the four-year pilot cull figures. 

Data fudge

The avoidance of badger cull scrutiny hides two stories. The first is that (as above) the pilot culls were never set up to show whether badger culling could contribute to the reduction of bTb in cattle. Despite this, the Animal Plant and Health Agency (APHA) have blasted data with “variables” to try to claim a positive outcome, while slapping warnings about reliability at the bottom of their write-ups. 

Unabashed, Defra has been quoting unreliable figures and foolishly feeding Ministers the lines to follow suit. This has been grossly unhelpful (perhaps also unethical and unlawful) and should be heading towards The House of Commons Committee on Standards. 

The only way a positive inference could be drawn from the data would be if pilot culling ‘worked’ in years 5 and 6 in ‘real-time’ as per the RBCT model.  All the signs are that bTB is actually going up or staying the same, and so at best, culling is part of failing measures. 

In not having to deal with that, Godfray does not need to comment on the ‘policy with no stop switch’. The policy’s rationale is that if bTB goes down it is working, and if it goes up, you just need to try harder and for longer. Once you start, you carry on regardless. 

Legal challenge papers in 2018 suggest that, despite Eustice’s mournful Westminster Hall statements repeating ‘’no one wants to cull badgers for any longer than they must’’, the government does plan to kill badgers until bTB disappears in 2038 or beyond. That is its strategy. 

Farmers’ efforts

Crucially, text on page 73 implies that farmers would need to ‘up their game’ to reduce cattle-to-cattle bTB transmission if badger culling were not to be continued. This suggests there is some kind of volume knob on the thoroughness of cattle-based measures.

Read one way, the scientists are suggesting that badger culling represents an attempt to substitute for inadequate test and movement controls that government won’t enforce due to industry pressure.  

While quite probably true (following patterns seen in New Zealand), this speculative comment lobs a brick through Defra and the NFU’s shared front window, telling both government and farm lobbyists that they are not doing enough. 

There’s talk of industry buy-in, and effectively that the solutions are there but not enforceable because the industry wants the public to pay for it. Now we see it. 

But this headline news, like others, is rather buried in the text with the authors presumably thinking that lifting the lid a little bit and putting it back on quickly would send the message without getting them into too much trouble. 

Finally, the research priorities for wildlife seem brief and unexplained, commensurate with low priority. 

Blowing the whistle

In the expertise areas of Profs James Wood and Glyn Hewinson we see a strange omission of the now well-established frighteningly low sensitivity of SICCT in order to clear bTB. The review holds with just one in five tests missing a reactor, when others find it typically two out of five, or even half having false negatives. 

The problem is that accepting the greater SICCT failure undoes the modelling surrounding a vast amount of science, including that which suggests badgers are significantly involved. The old TB scientists wrote about SICCT limitations before taking note, then rapidly all but eradicating bTB in the 1960s. 

This is perhaps the most dishonourable part of the review and it points to scientists and veterinarians close to the root of the bTB problem. This is something that vet Iain McGill has picked up with his ‘calling out of lies’ on government and bTB. Ultimately, with misuse of SICCT, other aspects of bTB policy in the Godfray review pale into insignificance. 

You can talk about risk-based trading and cattle movements, but if your basic test is as fundamentally flawed as modern science and abattoir reporting shows, you are fighting a war that you cannot win. So why did the reviewers not want to blow the whistle? 

Actiphage test  

Enter the new test on the block Actiphage. Around for decades for human use, it is safe and proven technology. You might have thought that a blood test that can spot and ID low density of live mycobacteriumwould be grabbed and championed. 

However, it seems that jealously in government funding circles has bullied the small guy to such an extent that Actiphage has been pushed off and held back for two years, and might yet be for another two or more. 

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) validation of Actiphage may now be delayed until 2020, when its use beyond the highly restrictive Exceptional use protocol is likely to be a decisive game-changer.

A determined Minister and Chief Vet together could fast-track the process, but have they been advised not to by someone? Does Godfray’s group know about this, or about how Defra can block new technology if political beasts don’t want to admit the livestock industry to hospital, where it belongs?

Even when the price of acting now is far less than that of the livestock meltdown of the current policy, with a multibillion price-tag awaiting the taxpayer down the line? Treasury Audit Commission please take note.

Veterinary interests

So Godfray has a diverse group with a range of vested interests, tutting at rules and regulations that are ‘sadly’ in the way of a full dissection of SICCT and Actiphage that could have been laid out in detail.

Godfray’s group even had a day out to vet Dick Sibley’s experimental herd at Gatcombe, Devon, where Actiphage has been in use. Actiphage, ‘the test that farmers want’ is the message that could have been the review headline, but blink and you’ll miss it.

All this is why the review should have been independent of Defra. Then it might have gone to the government legal department, EFRA and others, to clearly show the problems at the heart of government science and administration. 

There is a collective wish also to suppress Actiphage because compensation payments for Actiphage-detected bTB infections are not yet payable. Defra are hiding behind technical upfront costs of introducing Actiphage, but the many multi-million pound price tag that has been put about is probably well under a million, and is chicken-feed to the issue. 

Politically shifting the large (and lucrative, for some vets) SICCT-test regime, running at present at the farmers expense is no-one’s job it seems. If allowed, and the disease was tackled head on (via a government Task Force), beef and dairy would need a protective policy enabling sustainable reform and recovery. The public purse could be relieved and cow herds have a future once the vested interests were tackled.

Vaccination and resistance

As for‘Cattle Vaccination and Resistance’, this is review member Glyn Hewinson and the government’s APHA (Animal Plant and Health Agency) area. Sometimes referred to as the ‘ten-years-away joke’ with funding poured relentlessly into research for many years. 

There is no real appetite to focus on cattle vaccination however, due to the added costs, effect on exports and lack of a ‘divergence (DIVA) test’ to separate infected from inoculated cows. 

Here again, Actiphage is significant as it offers an accurate DIVA test, knocking out the past failed search for DIVA, much to the chagrin of those who have drawn repeated blanks.  

Also, might those in vaccination already know that wrong-thinking on SICCT is where vets and farmers UK and Ireland have fallen down?

A disappointing review?

All in all, despite the surrounding political context, the Godfray review falls short of delivering on the expected applied science component. It alerts people living on a fine margin that they may soon need to work harder. 

We can imagine how insulting this could seem to farmers who have been crushed and abused by misinformation on the validity of the SICCT test by vets and scientists for a lifetime. They needed a guiding light and what they got was a threat.

It is an indictment of the relationship between scientists, vets and government, and an example of policy led science in its darkest hour. The veiled text of the report some might argue, deftly punts the subject back onto political desks, possibly bouncing into the long grass beyond. 

A response to the review ‘next summer’ (Defra needs eight months to react) says it all, when what is needed is emergency action. The Godfray review tiptoes around, offering some insight into the bovine tuberculosis and badger cull crises. 

But it fails to pinpoint key science and to expand on it with sufficient depth when that was its job. It could however prove a turning point if used intelligently.

This Author

Tom Langton is a consulting ecologist to government, business and industry who provides advocacy support to charities and pressure groups seeking justice where environmental damage is being caused to species and habitats.

‘Try vegan’ charity Veganuary is today calling on Parliament to ditch meat and dairy for the month of January – to help avert catastrophic climate change.

To date, more than 250,000 people from 193 countries have tried the month-long pledge and by the end of January 2019 the charity expects a further 300,000 people to have taken part.

The government has so far done little to heed the advice of the scientific community, which argues that reducing meat and dairy consumption is vital if we are to address global warming.

Political leadership

The public appetite for everything vegan continues to skyrocket, according to the charity, but this has not been matched by policy or political leadership. Claire Perry MP, the minister whose job it is to tackle climate change, refused to recommend that people reduce their consumption of meals like steak and chips.

Rich Hardy, head of campaigns at Veganuary, said: “Switching to tasty plant-based alternatives in the cafeterias of Parliament would be a simple step to take for our leaders to lead by example, and show they’re serious about tackling climate change.”

Veganuary participants cite a number of different reasons to try vegan – including tackling climate change, improving their health and reducing animal suffering.

Veganuary is partnering with dynamic environmental and animal protection groups in India, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Australia, Brazil, Russia and South Africa to offer the full, locally-tailored Veganuary experience to people signing up for a 31-day vegan pledge in those countries, in their native language.

Journey of discovery 

People taking part in Veganuary this year will be helped through their month-long journey of discovery by Veganuary’s team of plant-based experts and a vast social media community.

Participants receive daily emails containing recipes, meal plans, inspirational videos, and helpful tips on nutrition, how to stock your cupboards and much more. They also receive thought-provoking information about the impact of what we eat on our health, animals and the environment.

And if that’s not enough, the Veganuary website – the world’s largest online resource for vegan pledgers – will be crammed full of exciting new content, including films from supporters in show-business, professional sport and the culinary world.

High-profile supporters of this year’s Veganuary campaign include Dancing with the Stars finalist and Harry Potter actress Evanna Lynch; Arsenal and France footballer Hector Bellerin; actor Peter Egan; Aussie cricket legend Jason Gillespie; leading animal advocate Earthling Ed; A Place In The Sun presenter Jasmine Harman; TV and radio presenter Sarah-Jane Crawford; and wildlife ambassador Chris Packham.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Veganuary.