This year looks set to be a top year for green and social investment as the UK’s leading peer-to-peer ethical investment company Abundance starts the year closing its largest fund raise to date, raising £7 million for innovative Scottish tidal energy company Orbital Marine Power (Orkney).

Orbital Marine Power (formerly Scotrenewables Tidal Power) will use the funds raised to build its first production model Orbital O2 2MW turbine, an innovative floating tidal turbine platform that can be towed, installed and easily maintained.

The project already has secured a number of supporting grants as well as equity funding, including from the Scottish Government.

World leader

The Abundance offer of 2.5-year debentures with an annual return of 12 percent attracted 2,278 individual investors, with over half investing via an Innovative Finance ISA for a tax-free return.

The average investment was approximately £3,000, with the project attracting particularly strong interest from investors in Scotland who put in 50 percent more on average, at £4,500.

Bruce Davis, co-founder and joint Managing Director, Abundance, said: “2019 promises to be the best year yet for the environmental and social investment sector, and it feels significant that our largest investment to date reached its £7 million target on New Year’s Day.

“The UK can rightly claim to be a world leader in tidal generation technology and our customers have backed it enthusiastically.”

With this new investment, Orbital Marine Power plans to build its Orbital 02 2MW turbine over the next 12 months, for deployment at Orkney’s European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) during 2020.

Floating turbine

The Orbital O2 turbine comprises a 73m-long floating superstructure, supporting two 1MW turbines on either side. 

The new turbine will draw upon the success of Orbital’s SR2000 turbine which was launched in 2016 and produced in excess of 3GWh of electricity over its initial 12-month test programme at EMEC.

Orbital’s floating turbine simplifies installation and maintenance as risky underwater operations can be avoided, keeping costs and downtime low, while floating systems can be deployed over a wide range of tidal sites in UK and global waters.

Andrew Scott, CEO, Orbital Marine Power, said: “We are delighted with this funding result; it’s a terrific endorsement of our technology and a clear signal that the UK public is hugely supportive of seeing tidal energy brought into the domestic and global energy mixes.

“The whole team at Orbital Marine are excited to be moving forwards with this flagship project and deliver the first O2 unit for costs similar to offshore wind and so provide the basis for a new and sustainable industry. This a journey we are now honoured to be taking with thousands of new investors, thanks to Abundance.”

Wind energy

Bruce Davis added: “From those who invest the minimum of just £5 to larger investors with tens of thousands to put to work in the green and social economy, each and every one of our customers is playing a part in building a better world while helping achieve their own life goals.

“We’ve got an exciting pipeline of new investments in a wide range of projects and technologies coming up this year. Expect to see more larger offers like this one as issuers take advantage of the change in EU rules on crowdfunding prospectus limits.”

Abundance also recently closed a wind energy investment, E2 Energy, a 16-year investment in a portfolio of farm-scale wind turbines paying an annual return of five percent, which raised £2.9 million.

Currently open for investment is CoGen Limited, a debenture offer for the UK’s leading developer of waste gasification facilities, which seeks to tackle the UK’s dual problems of waste and the need for lower carbon energy.

The 4.5-year debenture paying 10 percent a year launched shortly before Christmas, and has already raised over £1.5 million, 52 percent of its minimum target.

This Article  

This article is based on a press release from Abundance Investment. To find find out more visit its website. Abundance advertises with The Ecologist. 

The Human Aquarium is a brand new exhibition, premiering on 15 February 2019 in Leeds.

The exhibition looks at the world through the eyes of sea mammals. Using Mer-folk in place of marine mammals, it delves into the world of aquariums, their inhabitants.

What it is like to spend your life in a tank? For the animals still dependant on their natural habitat – the world’s oceans – what effect are single-use plastics having on their home? And why should we care?

Public engagement 

Despite the success of documentaries such as ‘Blackfish’ and ‘Blue Planet’ that provide information about captivity, single-use plastics and recycling, do we really know what we are buying into?

Whether it’s purchasing a disposable bottle of water or a ticket to a marine park, do we consider how our choices affect the planet?

The Human Aquarium is a free, family friendly and thought provoking, interactive event developed by local Leeds artists and activists. Volunteers will engage with the public and discuss these hot topics, present sustainable alternatives and provide opportunities to learn about more ethical choices.

The Human Aquarium team will be taking over an empty shop unit to replicate an aquarium and all things aquatic in Leeds City Centre.

During the exhibition the team will be creating a sculpture from single-use plastics that the public are invited to come along and add to.

Working together 

On 22nd Feb 6-9pm they will host an evening of environment-themed talks from some inspirational organisations: The World Cetacean Alliance; Plastic-Free Me; Greenpeace Leeds; Love the Oceans; Zero Waste Leeds; The Real Junk Food Project.

There will also be a variety of free, family friendly workshops including: Mermaid Mondays; Dolphin Scramble; Ocean Plastics Fish Making; Sculpting The Future The Forever Octopus.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Yorkshire Life Aquatic. See the event website for workshop, event details and opening times. 

The claim that I destroyed the environment is nothing to be proud of. It was 1961 and I was a horticultural trainee. Grounds maintenance was in the midst of a revolution; cheap herbicides and rotary mowers meant that we could dismiss the scythers at Shrewsbury Cemetery and tidy up the Victorian section.

It took a mere couple of years to destroy the wildflowers, together with the voles, butterflies and then the barn owl. This tidiness mantra was happening all over the UK and we have yet to recover from the impact.

My second mistake in those days was to become an advocate of cremation. I had abandoned horticulture and moved on to become a cremator operator. Cremation was hot, burial was dead and buried. 

Reducing maintenance 

I moved on to cemetery & crematorium management in various parts of the UK, where I experimented with wildflower conservation. I got this to a fine art in Carlisle in the 1980’s with 20 acres of old graves, mostly covered in pignut, black knapweed and orchids; the voles and owls returned. 

People noticed and some asked if they could be buried in the conservation areas. The answer was no, that the re-use of graves was not lawful. But the question remained, was it possible to integrate wildlife with burial?

My solution was a feasibility study in 1990 leading to the opening of the world’s first natural burial site in 1993. I was naive, slow to recognise the opposition this would attract from funeral directors and cremationists. 

The scheme at Carlisle was to create a double grave, side by side, so that the body was a maximum 4’ deep. This is as shallow and aerobic as possible within the law. Oak whips were planted on the grave with a mulch mat and native bluebell bulbs. Maintenance was limited to one cut late in the season.

This dramatically reduces costs because a typical cemetery grave can be mown 30 times each year. The graves were promoted on the basis that the environment must take precedence over human needs.

Return to nature

This meant that the bereaved had to choose an eco coffin, refuse embalming and accept the untidiness of the vegetation over the summer. Such advocates often avoid hothouse flowers flown to the UK.

Many funeral directors refused to offer the option and some still continue to do so. The concept was originally perceived as secular even though the clergy were supportive. 

The slogan ‘Return to Nature’ was used to foster an understanding of how our death can fit into the environment and a green lifestyle. The carbon in the body and coffin is locked up and will be absorbed by the tree or vegetation on the grave.

The carbon advantage is not restricted to one year because natural growth goes on sequestering carbon year on year for at least 75 years. The assumption is that graves under turf will be re-used again at that point.

Undisturbed wildflower turf is now understood to lock up carbon, and natural burials beneath a tree will do this for long periods. In my experience, many of the relatives of the deceased do not regularly return to a natural burial grave because they understand the need to reduce vehicle use. 

‘Gifting’ the body

New natural burial sites sprang up all over the UK, offering not just woodland but a variety of habitats including wildflower, orchard and even mixed farming. There are many cases where deer, hedgehogs, hares, voles, owls and many other less conspicuous creatures have returned to natural burial sites, which were hitherto devoid of life.

Professor Douglas Davies of Durham University described this kind of habitat creation as ‘gifting’ the body to future generations. He compared it to giving blood or donating organs.

There are now over 300 natural burial sites in the UK and the concept has spread to the US, Australia and worldwide.  

But the potential downsides of natural burial are not ignored. Firstly, there is a carbon cost in digging the grave. Some sites minimise this through hand digging, although a mini digger has a minimal carbon footprint.

Secondly, a decomposing body emits methane, a hazardous greenhouse gas. The fact that a natural burial is sealed in by undisturbed turf, often with tree roots, appears to mitigate this. 

Gas emissions

Natural burial highlights the problems that arise from gas cremation, which is really incineration. Cremation wastes the protein and fats in the body, converting them to pollutants. People assume that cremation abatement is comprehensive, which is untrue.

The EU demanded that mercury be removed but not the other emissions including dioxins and furans. The micro particulates are not captured. The abated sorbent, a hazardous waste, is stored forever in most countries.

In the UK it is said to be recycled but the firm doing this and their process is not transparent. Most cremators are used inefficiently, not being operated for long periods to reduce emissions. The abatement process also uses as much gas as the actual cremation. The sorbent recycling process must also have a significant fuel requirement.  

The emissions from cremation are mostly released in urban locations and the stack plume directly impacts on people living downwind. Eco coffins are not typically used, with the traditional veneered particle board coffins still favoured.

More recently, coffins of dubious environmental standards are being imported from China. The fittings and lining of these coffins are made of plastic.

Bodies are typically embalmed with two gallons of carcinogenic fluid, which is also emitted from the stack. This happens with over 400,000 cremations each year in the UK alone.  

This Author 

Ken West MBE worked for 45 years in bereavement services. He created natural burial in 1993, wrote the Charter for the Bereaved, and after retirement in 2006 published ‘A Guide to Natural Burial’ followed by ‘R.I.P. Off! or the British way of Death’. His third book My Pagan Ancestor Zuri – A Parallel Journey: Christchurch to Stonehenge will be published in July. His blog can be read here. 

In November 2008, the UK Parliament passed the Climate Change Act, the culmination of campaigning by groups like Stop Climate Chaos (now The Climate Coalition) and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, both of which the RSPB is a member.

What has the RSPB been doing since then to reduce the effects of climate change?

1) We helped bring about the UK and Scotland Climate Change Acts (2008) in the first place! 

And we continue to work on strengthening the UK and devolved government’s commitments to tackling climate change.

2) We’re one of the founding members of The Climate Coalition and Stop Climate Chaos Scotland

We are one of the founding members of The Climate Coalition. Together we raise awareness of how climate change is impacting the things people love; and work to influence governments in the UK. We’ve played a major role in the recent Show the Love campaigns, where people including MPs and celebrities wear handmade green hearts to show their commitment to protecting wildlife and the environment.

3) All our nature reserves are now managed with resilience to climate change in mind

We work to help wildlife thrive and adapt, including allowing for species shifting their range, and formerly occasional visitors moving in more permanently from continental Europe (e.g. spoonbills).

4) We are restoring valuable peat bogs across the UK

Our reserves in England alone save more than 90,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. In Scotland, long-term engagement with the Scottish Government has been key to securing a commitment to restore 250,000 hectares (equivalent to 250,000 international rugby pitches, or 350,000 football pitches!) of damaged peatland by 2030.

5) Creating new inland wetlands to provide new homes for wildlife such as bitterns, whose coastal habitats are threatened by sea level rise

The RSPB reserves at Ouse Fen, Ham Wall and Lakenheath Fen are prime examples of this. Ham Wall is now home to at least six species of heron. And Ouse Fen will contain the biggest reedbed in the UK.

6) We are future-proofing coastal communities to minimise flooding risks whilst creating new habitats for wildlife

Examples of this can be seen at Medmerry in West Sussex and Wallasea Island in Essex. Coastal realignment at Medmerry helps protect nearby homes but has also created a range of habitats for nature. Wallasea is another landscape-scale habitat restoration scheme, resulting in 670 hectares of coastal wetland. This ten year project was completed in 2018.

7) We have shown how the UK can deliver very high levels of renewable energy in harmony with nature

Take a look at our Energy Futures report.

8) We have put up a wind turbine at our UKHQ which produces enough energy to meet half of our total electricity needs

We’re also about to invest £1 million pounds in LED lighting and renewable energy on our own buildings, as well as adding a further eight solar panel systems to 25 existing installations.

9) We have built super-sustainable buildings

For example, the visitor centres at Saltholme, Rainham Marshes, Arne and the brand new building at Sherwood.

10) Through our work with Ecotricity, RSPB supporters have already saved over 3,500 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide

It would take 1,737,000 trees a whole year to store that much carbon! The average RSPB customer saves 704 kg of carbon dioxide every year they are supplied by Ecotricity.

This Author 

Jamie Wyver is a conservationist, gardener and RSPB Consumer PR Executive.

Wildlife trafficking is a multibillion-dollar illegal trade, with buyers and sellers openly using internet social media to do their dirty business.

Fortunately, computer learning experts are dedicated to combatting this dirty business. 

For two years, a project led by North-American conservationist Alexandra Russo and Dr. Colin McCormick, Senior Technical Advisor at Conservation X Labs, has been developing a facial recognition software. The programme will be able not only to recognize when photos published on the internet contain chimpanzees, but also identify the individual chimpanzee. 

Gathering information 

The technology – named ChimpFace – will become an essential tracking tool in combatting the illegal trafficking. It was one of the finalists in the Conservation X Labs Con X Tech Prize in November 2018,  and its preliminary prototype is being developed. 

Russo said: “I thought about this software after I started helping Dr. Dan Stiles in Pegas – Project to end Great Ape Slavery. I very quickly realized that looking for criminals online was actually incredibly tedious –  it’s like looking a needle in a haystack, among hundreds and thousands of photos on the internet.

“I started reaching out to computer learning experts asking whether developing an algorithm to recognize great apes in images was within the realms of possibility and luckily they said yes. 

In fact, the technology behind ChimpFace is very similar to the one applied in image recognition programs already used by police forces for other types of crimes. For ChimpFace to work, it was necessary to work with photos of known chimpanzees for the development of the algorithm. 

The idea of the software was then presented to nine conservation organizations: Centre de Conservation pour Chimpanzez/Project Primate International, Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest, Duke University, GAP Project Brazil, Jane Goodall Institute, Save the Chimps Sanctuary, Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuaryand Liberia Chimpanzee Rescue and Protection). These organisations became fundamental supporters of ChimpFace, providing images of captive chimpanzees who currently live in sanctuaries, as well as photos of wild chimpanzees.

Building an algorithm 

Russo said: “The more images we get, the more accurate we can build it up to be. It still needs to be improved a lot, but we have started. And we are really excited!”.

The original idea was that ChimpFace would work as an app, but they decided to start things simply. Russo emplaned: “Microsoft has granted us cloud computation credits, which we will use to deploy the software. 

“The first step of the development is the binary classifier, which is training an algorithm to recognize in any public available material either the image is of a chimpanzee or not”. This partial automation of the an otherwise manual search process will save a tremendous amount of time and money.

The second layer of ChimpFace, which requires much more work, is training the algorithm to recognize individual faces, so the movement of an individual can be tracked live online, so that the chimpanzee can be found in facilities in different countries.

This is what the project is currently aiming for, but there are many other useful applications for ChimpFace in the future, like monitoring the trade of live captive chimpanzees and studying wild chimpanzee populations. 

Sourcing funds

Reaching such big goals will require significant funding, time and resources.  But the Russo is optimistic: “In a dreamworld, a technology or social media company could incorporate ChimpFace into their systems, as long as they routinely monitor for crimes. Why not just add this to the level of policing already done? 

“The timing is fortuitous, as both wildlife trafficking and artificial intelligence (AI) are getting a lot of attention. AI is being advertised a lot, so we’re brining the fight against illegal wildlife poaching to the attention of big companies”.

Read more about ChimpFace here. 

This Author 

Jacqueline B. Ramos is the communication manager at GAP Project International and an environmental journalist. Read her blog here.

Honeybee farmer Jez Rose runs Bees for Business. The company works with businesses that want to adopt a beehive and help reverse the decline of the honeybee, as well as producing award-winning raw British honey under the brand name Bees&Co. 

The business has gained Carbon Neutral status by switching to a 100 percent renewable energy supplier, moving to 100 percent recyclable packaging, reducing identified carbon emissions created as a result of transport or deliveries and off-setting all remaining carbon emissions with a contribution to renewable energy.

It’s carbon neutral credentials endorsed by the Carbon Footprint Standard – an internationally recognised standard for establishing low carbon products.

Reversing the decline

Jez said: “This isn’t just another sustainability milestone for us but probably the most significant and we are delighted to run our organic farm and produce our delicious raw honey in such a way that further protects the environment – a world first. 

“We are an environmentally conscious brand with a campaigning message at our heart. Everything we do is working towards our aim of reversing the decline of the honeybee in the UK.  We have already banned pesticides, chemicals, plastic wrapping, non-recyclable IT products and unnecessary paper from our business.  

“Those businesses that adopt one of our beehives do so safe in the knowledge that not only are they elevating their corporate social responsibility credentials, but they are helping to keep our planet sustainable and helping us ensure the continued existence of the honeybee.”

Award winning 

There are very few food products that can be classified as carbon neutral – and Bees&Co. honey is a first for honey.  The honey produced on the farm is entirely natural, raw, British and produced in small batches with an intense amount of work going into every single jar. 

Food’s carbon footprint is measured by the greenhouse gas emissions produced by growing, rearing, farming and processing, transporting, storing, cooking and disposing of the food we eat. 

Bees&Co. Wild Countryside honey is the winner of a Great Taste Award and has iconic clients selling and using  the honey from within the hospitality sector, including The Ned hotel, Michelin-star Restaurant Story and Nobu Hotel in London.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a commissioning editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Bees for Business. The honey is available to buy direct to wholesale suppliers via the Bees for Business website  www.beesforbusiness.com

Marine Antarctic animals closely associated with sea ice for food or breeding, such the humpback whale and emperor penguin, are most at risk from the predicted effects of climate change, a new study published in Frontiers in Marine Science has found. 

Using risk assessments like those used for setting occupational safety limits in the workplace, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey determined the winners and losers of Antarctic climate-change impacts, which includes temperature rise, sea-ice reduction and changes in food availability.

Their research shows that seafloor predators and open-water feeding animals, like starfish and jellyfish, will benefit from the opening up of new habitat.

Climate change 

Dr Simon Morley, lead author, based at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), UK, said: “One of the strongest signals of climate change in the Western Antarctic is the loss of sea ice, receding glaciers and the break-up of ice shelves.

“Climate change will affect shallow water first, challenging the animals who live in this habitat in the very near future. While we show that many Antarctic marine species will benefit from the opening up of new areas of sea floor as habitat, those associated with sea ice are very much at risk.”

A growing body of research on how climate change will impact Antarctic marine animals prompted the researchers to review this information in a way that revealed which species were most at risk. 

Seabird ecologist Mike Dunn is co-author of this study, which forms part of a special article collection on aquatic habitat ecology and conservation. Dunn said: “We took a similar approach to risk assessments used in the workplace, but rather than using occupational safety limits, we used information on the expected impacts of climate change on each animal. 

“We assessed many different animal types to give an objective view of how biodiversity might fare under unprecedented change.”

Robust pioneers

They found that krill — crustaceans whose young feed on the algae growing under sea ice — were scored as vulnerable, in turn impacting the animals that feed on them, such as the Adèlie and chinstrap penguins and the humpback whale. The emperor penguin scored as high risk because sea ice and ice shelves are its breeding habitat.

Dunn added: “The southern right whale feeds on a different plankton group, the copepods, which are associated with open water, so is likely to benefit. Salps and jellyfish, which are other open-water feeding animals are likely to benefit too.”

The risk assessment also revealed that bottom-feeders, scavengers and predators, such as starfish, sea urchins and worms, may gain from the effects of climate change.

Dr David Barnes, co-author of this research, said: “Many of these species are the more robust pioneers that have returned to the shallows after the end of the last glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago, when the ice-covered shelf started to melt and retreat. 

These pioneer species are likely to benefit from the opening of new habitats through loss of sea ice and the food this will provide.”

Next step

Barnes continued: “Even if, as predicted for the next century, conditions in these shallow-water habitats change beyond the limits of these species, they can retreat to deeper water as they did during the last glacial maxima.

“However, these shallow-water communities will be altered dramatically – temperature-sensitive animals with calcium shells were scored as the most at risk if this happens.”

As more information becomes available, the researchers hope to improve their predictions.

Morley explained: “The next step is to assign weights to the factors and predicted impacts. For example, temperature is a factor that has major effects on cold-blooded marine animals, but will it be more of a problem than the benefit from loss of sea ice? It is very difficult to know until we have more data.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Frontiers. The full report can be read here. 

Textiles connect people. They are part of our everyday lives. They are also part of a journey and become threadbare. This leads to the idea of ‘bearing witness’, recognising the importance of stories of migration and allowing those stories to be told.

Of course, textiles themselves migrate, through historical trade routes. These threads have been exported and imported, these patterns are in our everyday lives. The title of our project Thread Bearing Witness is about the connecting thread of people.

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

The project includes three key pieces, ‘GROUND’, ‘SEA’ and ‘SKY’. They have a human scale, so you feel within them. ‘GROUND’ and ‘SKY’ are informed by refugees’ contributions of imagery and textile cultural heritage for a collective common ground of making. ‘SEA’ is the only one made by me alone. It emerged from the saturation of media imagery from that period of time in 2016. Everyone remembers those incredible images coming through the media daily of the horror of people in the sea.

Refugee support

The three pieces reflect my increasing involvement with individuals. I had to start making ‘SEA’ before I met any of the refugees. They took part in the project through ‘GROUND’ and ‘SKY’. This was because the pieces take a huge amount of time to make and I had to begin.

So there were practical considerations to take into account, but in a way I think that’s quite interesting, since the project is about learning through the voices of others, changing perspectives and representing those who contribute as truly as I could. The works open a space for others to enter and participate within.

My daughter, Tamsin Koumis, introduced me directly to the experience of refugee issues. She has a background of working with migrants and refugees and set up the Dunkirk Legal Support Team, which enabled access to human rights at the refugee camp in France. Her organisation has connections to various individuals who have come to this country.

I met up with them and carefully discussed how they might want to contribute to the project. It was very much led by them. I started meeting up with a group of Syrian women in my home town and continue to meet them weekly. I’ve become very close to them. I did some training with a refugee support group, Southampton & Winchester Visitors Group, since I was very aware that I needed to understand safeguarding and delicate, sensitive issues of trauma and culture.

There is no blueprint for how people have been participating. I’ve had to recognise we’ve got to treat each contribution very differently and to be open and led by each participant.

Resilience Collective

One contributor is Saamiullah Khan, an unaccom­panied minor from Kandahar, Afghanistan,who was in the Dunkirk camp and eventually came to the UK thanks to the Dunkirk Legal Support Team and others.

Khan had to leave Afghanistan because of the Taliban. His mother and sisters are still there. His father died in the UK. Saami is an extraordinary young man. He is truly gifted, and has a great sense of responsibility for his family, whom he is missing terribly.

We did various activities together. He wanted to design a piece of work and asked his family in Kandahar to stitch it into a beautiful cloth with the Afghan map at the centre. With Tamsin he wrote about Afghan embroidery. His circumstances were very compromised and difficult and we’ve now lost touch with him. So it’s been heart-rending.

I went with Tamsin to PIKPA refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece.That was very different. We made different things every day, building up trust with the residents. I now send out art and sewing materials, wool and crochet hooks so that the camp can continue making. Much of the project exists outside what is actually represented in the exhibition, and I feel that’s really important.

We wanted to include those who just wanted to be part of the project but aren’t refugees themselves. So we devised the Stitch a Tree project, inspired by the work of Refugee Resilience Collective, a group of narrative psychologists and psychotherapists working in the Calais camp. They held drawing workshops with children and used the tree of life as a narrative therapy tool, describing it as a symbol of strength, life and nourishment.

Stitch a tree

For the Stitch a Tree project, we invited people to contribute stitched trees. These form a collective forest, whichreflects the ideathat we are all individuals but we come together as a shared world. We expected 200 to 300 contributions, but there are now about 5,000.

We have had trees sent to us from groups of schoolchildren who have never stitched before, and beautiful exquisite contributions from experts. It’s multicultural, cross-generational and across genders. This has been a really extraordinary wave of human support, and it is still growing – it’s almost unstoppable.

Meeting with refugees has made me constantly reflect back on my own privilege. It can be very troubling to feel a helplessness to make change. Equally, we feel inspired by people who are living through traumatic circumstances. We are constantly asking ourselves if what we are doing is actually helping.

This notion of bearing witness and authenticity has been hard to negotiate and is very sensitive. I’m not an expert in migration. I’m just an artist. I can’t resolve these issues, but I can show that I care.

Textiles is a medium that has a really powerful presence. It’s a unique kind of activism holding sensitivities and nuances of soft voices that can be repressed and hidden, yet vocalised through this medium. These are the voices that can bear witness to all of those individuals who might not have a voice elsewhere.

This Author 

Alice Kettle is a contemporary textile/fibre artist based in the UK. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. Thread Bearing Witness is at the Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester until 24 February 2019. 

To see the need for change and head towards it, you have to ask the obvious, simple questions.

That’s what was done at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, when the campaigning group Feedback asked colleagues from the Soil Association, Friends of the Earth, Biovale and the Committee on Climate Change, “what is land for?”

It was clear from the discussion was that much of Britain’s land-use is far from optimal, a result of historical circumstances rather than any sort of rational choices for today.

Sugar beet

A farmer in the audience pointed out that a significant proportion of what’s now termed farmland only came into that use during the Second World War, when the nation was battling to beat the U-boats by feeding itself. 

As another contributor noted, financial incentives meant drainage of deeply unsuitable wetlands, the last of the last left, continued until the early 1980s. When the funding stopped, so did the drainage, like a stone dropped into one of the few remaining ponds.

That left us with only a tiny proportion of the wetland – the land vital for birds and other wildlife, for flood control, for carbon storage – of even decades before. The conference session didn’t even get started on house building on the greenbelt.

Even some of the best agricultural land being used for farming is being put to far from ideal purposes. A case study – and boy is it a disaster story – is that of sugar beet.

This is an immensely destructive crop, responsible for 10 percent of the total loss of soil in England from agricultural lands. Being a root crop, harvested in autumn in generally wet conditions, large amounts of the surrounding soil is picked up with the beet. So much, in fact, that British Sugar has a steady little earner sideline in selling the soil collected during processing.

So some of the richest, best agricultural soil in the land is being stripped away, to end up on golf courses or landscaping in new office blocks. And this for a crop producing empty, damaging calories. 

Improving our diets

The average British child by age 10 has consumed as much sugar as they should by age 18, as emerged with considerable fanfare last week. We don’t need more of it, and yet British Sugar is hoping to increase production by 50 percent.

Put the land used for sugar beet – even half of it – to growing vegetables biointensively, on the model of Bec Hellouin or Bio-Gemusehof, and it could make a huge impact on our huge deficit of fruit and vegetable supply for even our utterly inadequate consumption levels. It would create the opportunity for huge numbers of extra small businesses, and jobs, at the same time restoring rural communities hollowed out by consolidation of farms into larger and larger blocks.

The misuse problem isn’t just of land of course. A lot of the food is going into feeding animals, to produce a far smaller quantity of meat. Stopping that and eating the grain instead would produce far more calories, but of course calories aren’t what we need.

We need modest amounts of protein – considerably less than we consume now – which means growing more pulses and beans: Hodmedods is showing the way in that, recovering once-common crops that had been almost forgotten and improving the British diet at the same time.

What we also need is wildlife, and that means identifying the most appropriate land for rewilding, mostly with trees. Sometimes that will be the marginal land, sometimes parts adjoining existing woodland or corridors linking it, broadening the areas accessible to our wildlife. Of course that will also, essentially, store carbon to help to meet our legally binding emissions targets. 

Some land – including those new woodlands – can be used (very carefully) for sustainable, local, small-scale biofuel. 

Moving forward 

One of the first things we need is research, understanding, and measures of the environmental impact, not just in soil damage and climate emissions, but also contributions to eutrophication and air pollution, to flooding and wildlife.

We also need to be able to consider the nutritional benefits of a crop – beetroot far better than sugar beet, protein-rich lentils far better than standard wheat for Chorleywood process bread.

The answer has to lie in the fact that growing the wrong crop on the wrong soil in the wrong place has real costs. Some of those costs are borne by the farmer – but lots of them are carried by the rest of us in climate change and pollution impacts from the production and use of nitrogen fertiliser, in lost soil that won’t be replaced for millennia, in flooding, in obesity, ill-health and NHS costs.

A system that makes the profiter pay – that rewards farmers for producing nutritionally rich healthy food while ensure they don’t load costs on the rest of us – is clearly what’s needed.

In the sketched outline of the Agriculture Bill, there’s just a hint of the beginning of a scheme that could head the rich way. We must apply appropriate taxes to the production of surplus food and food that is produced in damaging ways (say for unsustainably produced meat, as Green MP Caroline Lucas was suggesting), and cut taxes and costs for those products that we do need. 

This isn’t easy and it isn’t simple. But given climate change, given our acute levels of nutritional dysfunction and the degradation of land, soils, air and water – there really isn’t any alternative.

This Author 

Natalie Bennett is a member of Sheffield Green Party and former Green Party leader.

Dog food containing grubs mixed with oats and potato has been launched today, in the latest development in the trend to lower the environmental impact of food.

The insects in the pet food by Yora are reared in the Netherlands, and contain protein, fats, minerals and amino acids. They live on vegetable matter that would otherwise go uneaten, reaching full size in 14 days, removing the need for growth hormones or antibiotics often found in meat, according to Yora.

Dog and cat food contributes around 25-30% of the environmental impacts from animal production, in terms of the use of land, water, fossil fuel, phosphate and biocides, and releases significant amounts of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, according to a study by professor Gregory Okin from the University of California.

Weekly shop

When compared to beef farming, insect-based pet food needs just two percent of the land and four percent of the water to produce each kilogramme of protein, which means they generate 96 percent fewer greenhouse emissions, according to a study carried out by Protix, which supplies the insects used in Yora’s dog food. 

The Food and Agriculture Organisation, part of the UN, has also produced a study highlighting the environmental benefits of insect food. Tom Neish, founder of Yora, said: “Animals and humans have been eating insects since the dawn of time and we believe Yora is the future of pet food.”

The idea of eating insects in Western diets has been gaining traction recently. In November, Sainsburys began stocking roasted crickets for human consumption by Eat Grubs citing its own research which found that 42 per cent of people would be willing to try eating insects, with seven per cent willing to add them to their weekly shop if they were easily available.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.