When I started writing my book, The Great Flood, I wanted to understand the psychological and emotional effects of being flooded, as well as its physical consequences. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how upsetting it must be to have to watch, helplessly, as polluted water pours through your doors or windows, or seeps upwards through your floors, destroying your possessions and turning your home into a sodden, stinking cave.  

Yet flooding seemed to induce a degree of anguish that couldn’t be reduced to a rational tallying of its effects: as one civil servant said to me, flooding was ‘disproportionately upsetting’.

Malign and unfamiliar

We are drawn to water for many different reasons – spiritual and emotional as well as practical.  We cherish the sea view and the sound of running water.

Philip Larkin wrote, in a poem called ‘Water’, which attempts to define a liturgy for the spiritually uncommitted: “If I were called in / To construct a religion / I should make use of water”.

Baths and fountains are an enduring emblem of civic good. Yet flooding turns a substance that we depend upon and revere into something malign and unfamiliar.  Floodwater isn’t soothing or beguiling, like rivers or streams, or awe-inspiring, like the sea. It is dirty, cold and destructive, and when it erupts from the channels in which we seek to contain it and invades people’s homes, it leaves stains that cannot easily be erased.

It isn’t a new phenomenon: we have always told stories of great floods that sweep the earth and drown its people, and stories of lost lands beneath the seas. 

I wondered if that was why it was so upsetting.  To those affected, being flooded feels like the end of the world. Yet the Noah myth is a comic story, in the sense that it offers the promise of rebirth and regeneration. 

Even people with no religious convictions may find it hard to resist the irrational belief that they will be the ones to be saved. There may be room for only one family on the ark – one pair of breeding adults to accompany the animals – but we like to think that it will be us. 

Delusional optimism 

I wondered whether the sense of exceptionalism embedded in the old stories explained our attitude to global warming: they confirmed that the planet had always flooded, but they also told us that we would come through okay. 

Such optimism seems increasingly delusional. When I started travelling around the UK, it had endured a series of devastating floods at the Biblical interval of every seven years: there were floods in 2000 and floods in 2007, and while I was visiting places that had flooded, and meeting the people who had been affected, the record-breaking floods of the winter of 2013 – 14 began. 

The seven-year cycle may not resume during the next eighteen months, but the underlying trend is clear.  Already, the mild, wet summers that I remember from childhood holidays in Scotland and the Lakes have disappeared.

The author Brian Stone wrote in the London Review of Books in 2018: “For anyone under the age of 30 – more than half the world’s population – the experience of a stable climate is entirely unknown. That is to say, not a single month in their lifetime has fallen within the limited range of temperature, precipitation or storm activity that governed the planet for the previous 10,000 years.”

According to Met Office figures, nine of the ten warmest years on record in the UK have occurred since 2002 – and, since a warmer climate holds more water, they have also brought more floods. 

Sea levels

Between 2005 and 2014, UN statisticians counted an average of 335 weather-related disasters per year around the world – a 14 percent increase on the period from 1995 to 2004, and nearly twice the number recorded between 1985 and 1994.  

The greatest rise was in the numbers of storms and floods.  Flooding alone accounted for 47 percent of all weather-related disasters.  By the end of the century, damage from floods could increase worldwide by a factor of 20.

The seas are rising too: once, in Bristol, I saw marks chalked on the pavement showing how much of the city will be lost if sea-levels rises by a metre, as we have been told it will by the end of the century. 

In 2014, the Environment Agency estimated that more than 7,000 homes will be lost by 2100, and a recent report by the Committee on Climate Change put the potential loss even higher: by the 2080s, it said 100,000 properties, 1,600 kilometres of road, 650 kilometres of railway and 92 stations will be at risk. So will ports, power stations and gas terminals.

Toxic waste from 1,000 landfill dumps may fall into the sea.

Ecological catastrophe

I was lucky: I had never been flooded, though I have lived in flood-prone places, like the Northumberland town of Morpeth, which flooded in 2008, and again, four years later, in 2012.  

Other places that I knew and loved had flooded repeatedly, as well, like the Lake District towns of Keswick and Cockermouth. I wondered what it was like to live in places that had become vulnerable to the vagaries of the weather in ways they never had before. 

I assumed that being flooded would remind people of the fragile nature of our domestic arrangements, and the way they can be overthrown.  Yet many of the people that I met saw the causes of the floods that had overwhelmed their homes as local and provisional: they blamed bureaucrats, rather than the workings of nature aggravated by the pressures that seven billion people exert upon the planet. 

Dismayingly, I met climate science deniers, insistent that there was more to worry about than a little carbon in the atmosphere, and others who were preoccupied by identifying precisely where the water that engulfed their home came from, and how it was released.

Perhaps that is how the human imagination always works: since we cannot encompass the idea of ecological catastrophe, we look for more immediate causes.  I wanted to reflect those concerns and show how the floods affected their day to day lives. 

But I also wanted to dramatise the broader context in which the floods occurred, both in terms of the mythic underpinnings that shape our emotional response, and in terms of the worsening weather that ensures that being flooded is an experience that more of us will be forced to endure.

This Author 

Edward Platt’s first book, Leadville, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He is also the author of The City of Abraham, a journey through Hebron, the only place in the West Bank where Palestinians and Israelis lived side by side.

The Great Flood: Travels through a Sodden Landscape will be published by Picador in October.

Image: Flooding in Dumfries. Rainbow International, Flickr. 

A sloth smiles, supporting itself on a branch with its three claws without sensing what is coming. It has just finished eating a few leaves and it readies itself for its never-ending nap to help along digestion.

Sloths are the slowest mammals on Earth. Their lives of repose have allowed them to survive for 64 million years, much longer than humans and other more agile animals.

The fire remains unseen but travels at the speed of the wind. The sloth sleeps.

Slashing and burning 

The politicians exclaim that “the fire was an accident”. In 2019, how can there be an accidental fire that razes 957,000 hectares (3,700 square miles)? This is sixty times the area of Bolivia’s capital of La Paz. It’s almost the entirety of the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS).

A fire of these dimensions is not the product of one or one hundred accidents; it is the product of thousands of fires all started in recent days.

Every year there is chaqueo – slashing-and-burning – but this time it has been multiplied a thousand-fold by the government’s call to expand the agricultural frontier. Ethanol and biodiesel require hundreds of thousands of hectares for inputs like sugar cane and soy.

To this, add meat exports to China which require millions of hectares of pasture for cattle. There are also the political land grants and illegal settlements in forest areas. What is happening is no accident.

Five years ago, the vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera challenged Bolivian agro-industrialists to expand the agricultural frontier by one million hectares (3,860 square miles, or two-thirds of Connecticut) per year. That target figure has been reached, but with lands devastated by fire, not productive agricultural lands.

Violated rights

The fire approaches. First a spark, then another. Ash falls on the fur that camouflages the sloth. It wakes, confused, without understanding what is happening. It feels burning pinpricks and lets out a painful moan as it slowly moves in search of refuge.

This is Bolivia. The country where Mother Earth has rights. Where there is a law that says forests, rivers and sloths have the right to life and to “maintain the integrity of the life systems and natural processes which sustain them.”

A country where contradiction is in power. Where the president gives speeches at international meetings in defence of Pachamama, the Mother Earth revered by the indigenous people of the Andes, while in Bolivia the rights of Mother Earth are violated. A country where in just 24 hours the parliament unanimously approves a law for the massive expansion of biofuel production.

Not a single parliamentarian speaks for the forests that, even then they are crackling at more than 300 degrees centigrade. The legislators all celebrated Bolivia’s entry into the era of biofuels. The same happened with the export of meat to China. None demanded prior environmental impact studies.

Of all the ways to die, the most painful is by fire. Feeling your skin char, the flames invading even your bone marrow and screaming until your voice melts, you plead for cardiac arrest.

In the times of the inquisition witches and heretics were burned at the stake. Today human bonfires are prohibited. Since World War II and the Nazi Holocaust, the cremation of the living is considered a crime against humanity. No government would consider promoting policies of human incinerations, yet torching other living beings is on the rise in various countries on Earth.

Election strategy

The fires this year are the product of a reelection strategy for national elections to be held in October. From a prior position of opposition to biofuels, the government flipped 180 degrees – without even blushing – to promoting ethanol and biodiesel as “green energy” sources.

The idea is to grow agribusiness of Bolivia’s eastern lowlands to win their support in the elections. The same with the cattle producers, and large refrigerated shipping companies. Following the example of Paraguay which devastated their forests to feed cattle, the Bolivian government cleared agribusiness a pathway to export meat to China.

The dry leaves start to catch fire. The sloth hangs, climbing in slow motion until it reaches another tree. Anguish is reflected in its face. Smoke filling its lungs, it breathes with difficulty. Without hurrying or pausing it continues its climb. Occasionally wavering, it’s sustained by claws and survival instinct.

The candidates, who have said little or nothing about deforestation, biofuels and meat exports, run to the disaster areas for photo opportunities. Among themselves they look for who to blame, but no one wants to point to the development model of agribusiness in the eastern lowland capital of Santa Cruz, which is responsible for most of Bolivia’s deforestation.

In 2015, of the 240,000 hectares deforested in Bolivia, 204,000 hectares were in Santa Cruz. In 2012, when deforestation in Santa Cruz stood at 100,000 hectares, 91 percent was illegal. By 2017, with a stroke of the pen the government had declared legal one-third of that deforestation.

Challenging totalitarianism

Nature should not be burned at the stake, legally or illegally. Setting fire to a forest or other living beings, human or not, is a crime that degrades the human condition.

The sloth reaches the top of the highest tree, an imposing mapajo (ceiba pentandra) 70 meters tall. The horizon is in flames. It is said the sloth lives slowly to not die fast. Now all depends on the fortitude of a 300-year-old tree.

Hopefully the winds will help. No chance of rain. In the distance the President’s helicopter flies over the inferno. He talks of evacuating people without uttering a word about the sloth or the other beings of Mother Earth.

In a few days the candidates will return to campaigning, some to challenge totalitarianism and others to camouflage it, but none to denounce the anthropocentric totalitarianism we carry inside.

This Author

Pablo Solon is former Bolivian ambassador to the UN. This article was first published in Spanish in Rascacielo (Skyscraper), the Sunday magazine of Pagina Siete. The article was translated by Tom Kruse. 

Farmers in north east Syria struggled in June 2019 to control wide-spread crop fires that laid valuable wheat fields to ashes and seriously impacted food security.

These fires slowly encroached the oil fields and worsened an already rapidly deteriorating situation. For years, environmental issues have worsened in Syria, resulting in serious pollution and the breakdown of environmental governance.

These problems arise from a broken oil industry, the absence of proper waste management, damaged water infrastructure, and conflict. 

Gasoline

The curse of the black gold has wide purchase in the northern and eastern parts of Syria. Decades of oil extraction has provided local communities with jobs and income.

When the peaceful revolution against the Assad regime resulted in a all-out conflict, armed groups struggled for control over the oil fields and infrastructure. The oil ensures a continuous flow of money, and is coveted.

The ensuing fighting crippled the oil industry: a lack of skilled workers and a relentless air campaign by both the US-led Coalition and the Russian Air Force soon resulted in widespread destruction of the wells, pipelines trucks, pumping jacks and refineries in Deir ez Zor and Hasakah.

Local communities and armed groups resorted to dangerous coping strategies as: this part of Syria witnessed the rise of makeshift oil refining, a hazardous and polluting practice way which crude oil is heated in drums under open fires to initiate a distilling process for benzine and diesel.

Soon this practice spread like a cancer through the eastern part of the country, while later popping up in the western part of Syria, with major clusters of makeshift refineries in Idlib and Aleppo.   

Radical ecology

Prior to the war, Syria produced roughly 400,000 barrels of oil per day. Along with the Jazeera oil fields in Hasakah, this oil was an important source of revenue for the government.

The newly established Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria struggled with these refineries. Their political view has a strong radical ecology component, based on the views of communalist and basic-democracy ideology, such as that put forward by Murray Bookchin.

Though the Self-Administration disagrees with the heavily polluting and unhealthy professional and artisanal refining, it does not have the resources to avoid these practices. In fact, it needs the oil for income in order to govern the region.

Despite this conundrum, the administration felt forced to act, as civilians started to protest against these hazardous practices that severely damage the health of the workers, exposing them and nearby communities to the noxious fumes.

Pollution from the oil industry is affecting the soil and groundwater in the region as waste is flowing from the refineries in rivers and creeks. 

Artisanal refineries

As part of PAX’s work on the environmental dimensions of armed conflict, I travelled with a colleague to north east Syria in late 2018 to get a better understanding of the environmental dynamics that came in to play. We combined our field research with open-source investigations to map the scale of the problem.

Using satellite imagery, we mapped the clusters of artisanal refineries which reached their peak use in 2016. In the area currently controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces, there have been at least 330 clusters of refineries, with some clusters counting/including over 1000 refineries.

Beginning in 2017, most of the sites in Hasakah were forced to shut down due to the new regulations imposed by the Self-Administration. Better regulations, however, did not solve the problem. 

What we found was an alarming situation that warrants rapid action to improve the lives and livelihoods of local communities. Key issues around environmental damage resulting from armed conflicts need to be addressed on an international level with the support of local initiatives.

Bleak picture

During our time in the Jazira region, we talked with local oil workers, nearby villagers, and local authorities. A bleak picture emerged from their stories: constrained by limited means of income, thousands of people, including many children, often worked at these sites.

We were told that one single refinery cluster run by people from local villages could provide income to 300 families.

Representatives from the Department of Municipalities in Qamishli, that are also responsible for environmental management tell us that they impose taxes on oil incomes derived from makeshift refineries, and – as a way of compensation – is used for reforestation in other areas in the Jazira region.

Their largest concerns were the waste water issues from oil and air pollution. The latter was the reason to shut down 80 percent of the artisanal refineries mid-2017. 

Yet still we come across operational artisanal refinery sites in small villages were young boys, covered in oil sooth, are cleaning dirty oil drums. The Self-Administration lacks the right equipment to rebuild the oil sector in a less-polluting way and is not capable of regulating the sites properly. 

Health impacts

The oil workers we met were often local farmers, while others were displaced Syrians seeking refuge from other parts of the country.

Mohammed, a 44-year-old worker, lives in a nearby village and has been working on the site for four years. There isn’t any other work available for him. He also cares for five children.

The biggest risks, he explains, are the exploding refineries that have taken the lives of workers. Besides that risk, he tries to avoid exposure to the toxic fumes as much as possible.

While visiting various clusters of artisanal and semi-professional refineries in the area, the stories from each oil worker reflect a similar tone: driven by a lack of alternatives and accepting the health risk they struggle to make ends needs and provide income for their families 

Sadly, oil is not the only environmental issue that beats the drum. The processing of household, industrial and medical waste, for example, poses many hazards.

Waste management

Close to one of the ‘oil rivers’ flowing down from Ger Zero, a large oil facility nearby, littered with piles of waste we often came across shepherds herding their flocks. The sheep graze between the waste that is near the river, which illustrates the endemic problem with proper waste management.

The larger towns and cities generate tons of household, industrial and medical waste each day. It all needs to be collected, separated and safely stored, but processing facilities or waste management expertise is lacking in these conflict-affected areas, partly due to import restrictions.

Local authorities fear the waste leachate ends up contaminating the groundwater near dumpsites, as they have not been able to build safe landfills. In Qamishli alone, 50 tons of trash is collected daily and the nearby waste dump has now resorted to burning the waste.

Nearby communities started protesting, fearing health problems from air pollution, partners of PAX reported.  

Conflict damage also leads to issues with water. ISIS damaged the water infrastructure by destroying irrigation channels, water wells and pumping systems. This has already affecting agriculture and access to water for villages according to both local officials we talked to, and humanitarian needs assessments.

What’s next? 

With the renewed threat of a Turkish invasion, the situation will only get worse. The fragile environmental conditions and under-resourced governance is failing to address the pollution concerns arising from a barely functioning oil industry, damaged water infrastructure and a waste management system that’s nearing collapse.

The crop fires which laid 1600 km2 of crop fields to ashes also had a devastating impact due to lack of firefighting equipment and access to water.

Restoring a democratic and effective government structure through local councils, one that can take care of its citizens and their environment, requires significant support from international donors. In particular European states and the EU should provide support, in terms of environmental expertise, capacity building of local staff and proper equipment.

The EU and other progressive states have built significant expertise and supported international political initiatives around the times of conflict and environment. Support should be given in line with UNEA resolution 2.15 and 3.1, which address protection of the environment in armed conflict and pollution resulting from armed conflicts.

Clean-up and restoration will be pivotal in providing farmers and local communities with perspective on rebuilding a sustainable future. This work would help to prevent worsening health and environmental impacts, but would also serve as a tool for building peace through cooperation and restoration. 

This Author 

Wim Zwijnenburg works for PAX, a Dutch NGO focussed on peace and conflict-prevention. He tweets @wammezz.

Upgraded connectivity through 4G and 5G could reduce energy consumption and costs, improve transport integration and boost jobs in remote rural areas, according to a report by analysts.

The report, by the Scottish Futures Trust (SFT), states that if Scotland capitalises on opportunities presented by 4G and 5G, Scotland’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) could increase by £17bn in just over 15 years, and that annual tax revenues could rise £5.7bn from 3,000 new businesses employing 160,000 more people.

The continuous connectivity gained through 5G networks – which are more reliable, faster and can accommodate more devices or sensors – could provide localised flood warning systems using 5G-connected sensors to measure river-level changes, and use smart, integrated energy grids to reduce energy consumption and costs, the report states.

Efficiency gains

The networks could support Scotland’s carbon reduction targets by allowing public bodies to use smart lighting, smart heating and smart electric vehicles charging hubs, according to the analysts from Deloitte, who carried out the research on behalf of the SFT. Sensors on street lights could detect air pollution and monitor congestion, they added.

Other uses of 5G technology have the potential to make Scotland’s rural economy more sustainable in the long-term, for example, through applications that monitor the health of salmon, and soil analysis using drones to reduce the amount of fertiliser used.

The Scottish government has simultaneously launched a 5G strategy setting out how it wants to embrace the economic benefits from improved 4G and 5G capability. It highlights how the technology will enable new or enhanced connectivity in transport, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and remote monitoring.

SFT is owned and funded by the Scottish government. A spokesperson stated that there were no potential conflicts of interests in relation to the funding of the report and companies involved with 5G when asked by The Ecologist.

This Author

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

There is a concerted effort in the media to attack and undermine those campaigning for the environment – whether it’s Piers Morgan throwing up a vegan sausage on breakfast TV, Brendan O’Neill complaining about ‘Green Miserablism’, or Julia Hartler-Brewer trolling Greta Thunberg. 

This shouldn’t be a surprise and should be seen in some ways as a compliment. Not so long ago climate change was never even mentioned in our media, and environmental issues were continually represented by white men in socks and sandals.

Things have moved on a long way in a relatively short amount of time. We now have experienced politicians talking about the climate, along with representatives of campaign groups putting sensible and professional arguments forward about why climate issues need to be taken seriously.

Controversy mongering 

We’ve had to fight every step of the way for this and we still have a long way to go. Often during election periods Green candidates are begrudgingly given the minimal coverage possible on mainstream TV, while the laziest of journalists return to old stereotypes. 

The bigger threat isn’t the complacency of old media, but the role of the new wave of shock-driven  journalists who happily present right wing views as ‘common sense’ or ‘what everyone is thinking but not allowed to say’, whilst blaming the (nonexistent) policing of political correctness.

This is a carefully constructed narrative that has been built up over many years by tabloid journalists and their paymasters. It has made a major contribution in the rise of populist right wing politicians such as Farage.

Every opportunity is used to present green views as extreme, cultist and dangerous to society. Greta Thunberg’s media appearances are described on social media as child abuse engineered by those who want to spread fear about climate change; people arguing for availability of affordable healthy food are painted as trying to take away people’s rights to eat as much eat as their arteries can take.

These controversy mongers perpetuate a general message that people should have the right to drive, fly and damage their environment as much as they like, without any taxes or controls, while in reality the industries providing these products and services often enjoy some of the biggest public subsidies and lack of regulatory controls.

Bursting bubbles

Can you imagine if the tables were turned? What would happen if we had a progressive media that gave space to talking about right wingers with such hostility?

What if there were more radio and TV presenters who shared a green vision, and weren’t afraid to present that as common sense and mock every guest who they invited on to give an opposing view? That’s a breakfast TV show I may be bothered to tune in to.

Until we have a progressive media we need to support and congratulate those who are regularly stepping into the lion’s den, taking on the climate deniers and right wingers – and appreciate that the public need to hear our messages as much as possible.

I totally sympathised when Green campaigner Rupert Read refused to go on the BBC because a climate denier was invited to sit opposite him in debate. He is correct that the debate should never be about whether climate change is real, given the scientific facts.

However, we live in a world where just being right isn’t enough and I respectfully fear that his approach was short sighted. The BBC should present climate change as fact and not up for debate. So should all other media. But the correct place to call them out for this failure is on air by challenging the presenters, not on our own Twitter feeds and in our own bubbles.

Shock media

Too many members of the general public have been fed lies by climate deniers. We need to work hard to pull them back to reality, and the best way to do this is through mainstream media.

Campaigners need to work closely together and support one another against the recent onslaught from shock media celebrities.

We need to look at where the funding for the attackers is coming from and what their motivation is, and we need to be as organised as they are in making arguments that appeal to everyone. 

This Author 

Matt Townsend is an environmental campaigner. Twitter: @Matt_J_Townsend. 

Image: IABUK, Twitter. 

Sheep have been let loose to graze on London’s Hampstead Heath for the first time since the 1950s in a bid to keep vegetation in check in an environmentally-friendly way.

The five animals – supplied by the inner city Mudchute Park & Farm and made up of Oxford Down and Norfolk Horn breeds – have been set to work in a fenced-off area known as the Tumulus – the last resting place of Queen Boadicea, according to unconfirmed local legend.

The project is being run by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust and the City of London Corporation, which owns the heath, with volunteers from the Heath and Hampstead Society and the charity Heath Hands.

Captial

Bob Warnock, the superintendent for Hampstead Heath, said sheep can play a major role in boosting species-rich wildlife habitats as well as replacing noisy and polluting machinery.

He said: “Sheep are ideal as they nibble away at encroaching brambles and shrubs that are starting to invade this area.”

John Beyer, of the Heath and Hampstead Society, said: “This idea came up at a society lecture given by painter Lindy Guinness, who showed paintings by John Constable of cattle grazing on the heath.

“This romantic vision happily coincided with the aim of heath staff to experiment with grazing rather than tractors to manage the landscape. “

The project is not the first of its kind in a green space in the capital. Two years ago, six sheep were brought into London’s Green Park to help tame dominant plants.

This Author

Bethany Watterson is a reporter with PA.

Ecosystems – defined as ‘all the living things in an area and the way they affect each other and the environment’ – are central to how the natural world functions.

They depend on something referred to as ‘dynamic equilibrium’ for stability. That is to say, through constant rebalancing, a stable ecosystem can thrive.

The threats to balance in an ecosystem may be a natural disaster or the spread of disease, for example, but are also human interference and habitat destruction. Around the globe, human activity threatens the fine balance of the ecosystems that all life on earth, including our own, depends on.

Unfolding

Throughout history these ecosystems have been impacted, devalued, and devastated by human influence, as have the human and animal lives which directly depend on them.

The scale of this damage has increased in line with an industrialised, and increasingly powerful global society, and in the past century catastrophic and at times irreversible changes have taken place.

However, only relatively recently have large numbers of people in the Global North become actively engaged with the issue.

To those not directly impacted, widely available media on social networks, news articles, documentaries — such as the widely-acclaimed Netflix series ‘Our Planet’ — have brought the reality of ecological breakdown home to an audience of concerned viewers.

Images of bleached coral reefs devoid of life, seabirds dripping in oil, and walruses crammed onto tiny remnants of ice sheets demonstrate the severity of currently unfolding ecosystem impacts.

Spark

This societal shift in understanding is having implications in the political sphere, with grassroots social movements such as the UK Student Climate Network’s #YouthStrike4Climate and Extinction Rebellion gaining increasing prominence.

This has been coupled with headline-dominating reports from the UN climate change panel (IPCC), which highlights the urgent requirement for action, now crystallised in the common-place use of the term ‘emergency’.

In this spirit, our parliamentarians in the UK have brought the climate and ecological crisis to the House of Commons a number of times in the form of debates and interventions, while voting to pass a symbolic parliamentary climate emergency motion. However, much more still needs to be done.

Furthermore, 2019 has seen a spike in reporting on unfolding environmental damage, with climate and environmental issues polling at their highest in terms of societal concerns in the UK.

Disasters and extreme weather can be the most obvious forms of climate change, and spark conversations in the social and political worlds.

Destroyed

Examples of this include the extreme water shortages in the cities of Chennai, India and Cape Town, South Africa, home to millions and millions of people. Thousands more of these disasters, particularly in the Global South, don’t even make it to our headlines.

Hurricanes and tropical storms become more ‘energetic’ as the planet warms, and have devastating impacts on humans and nature.

The impact that they have is not just due to the warming planet however, but is also due to the relative poverty and emergency structures in place where they land. Partly due to this, the same hurricane can have a deadly impact as it lands in Haiti, and continue on to the USA to inflict only material damage to buildings.

As this blog series progresses, we will continue to explore the interaction between the ‘ecosystems’ (the natural world) and the ‘political systems’ of our world, showing how they are in fact a single, global system. The current, dominant political system, not only devalues nature, but also values certain lives over others.

It’s easy to get lost in all of the headlines that spell out devastating and often unimaginable global destruction. A lot of the media doesn’t really break down the on-the-ground situation, how our ecosystems that comprise the natural world are being destroyed, so we’re going to try and do our best at just that.

Political

Life on Earth is currently experiencing the 6th mass extinction event in its history. The previous event occurred around 66 million years ago, wiping out around 75 percent of all species on earth. Shockingly, a 2018 report found that since 1970, humans have wiped out 60 percent of animal populations on Earth.

The primary direct cause of this destruction is the clearing of forests and other habitats to make way for agriculture (especially beef, and cereal crops) and for the production of commodities such as palm oil and rubber.

The unsustainable use of habitat destroying and non-discriminant fishing techniques are also emptying the seas of fish, while agriculture is polluting the soils and waters with chemicals.

So though climate breakdown is having an increasingly deadly impact on our ecosystems, it is not alone, but sits among other leading causes such as agricultural practices, resource extraction, and air and water pollution.

The natural world is threatened by all of these, all of them are worsened by human activity, and so all interact with our ‘political system’.

Jeopardise

Meanwhile, other industries such as fossil fuels and fashion sectors are also having immense impacts on ecosystems as companies compete to extract and harvest resources. As a result, UN’s Global Assessment Report states that “nature and its vital contributions to people” are “deteriorating worldwide”.

But what does that mean to young people across the world? We can live without nature right? WRONG.

Nature’s contributions to human life are invaluable and often irreplaceable. Whether it’s the air we breathe, the water we drink or the food we eat, we need the natural world. We are part of the natural world, not outside or above it — and like all life on Earth, we depend on it for survival.

So when we talk about nature, the natural world and how it sustains life on the planet, these are referred to as ‘ecosystem services’. As defined by the UK National Ecosystem Assessment:

Put in these terms, it seems obvious that we can’t do without them, and we certainly shouldn’t be doing anything to the natural world that may jeopardise such services.

Shift

However, as demonstrated previously, we’re destroying nature at such an alarming rate that our ecosystems, and the services they provide are very much at risk.  Though we can understand ecosystems to exist in a state of flux, change at this rate outstrips many species’ ability to adapt.

These species and ecosystems have intrinsic value (meaning that they have value regardless of the outside world, there is something within them which gives them value). However the role they play in human systems can be described through such services, to help us understand how systems can interact.

In the next blog, the sociopolitical systems we inhabit are explored further, allowing us to dissect the relationships between the two.

One system, our economic system, based upon continuous growth through the extraction of resources from the Earth, is putting dangerous stress on the ecosystems supporting life on our planet.

It’s even framing the very way we refer to nature, through phrases such as ‘ecosystem services’. Ensuring that balance can grow, that the natural world isn’t destroyed beyond repair, and that all life and all lives are valued, will require a shift in our economic, political and social modes of organising, in other words, system change.

This article

This article has been written by members of the UK Youth Climate Coalition for The Ecologist.

A tremor measuring 2.9 on the Richter scale has been felt near the UK’s only active fracking site, less than two days after a previously record-breaking tremor at the facility.

The British Geological Survey reported a large tremor related to fracking activity hit near Blackpool at 8.30am on Monday.

The tremor comes only two days after a 2.1 scale “micro seismic event” was detected at the Cuadrilla energy site late on Saturday evening, previously the largest tremor ever recorded at the site.

Suspended

That event lead to operations being suspended at the site, and they had not resumed by the time of Monday’s tremor, which had a depth of two kilometres and was strong enough to be felt by some residents.

According to the British Geological Survey, this is the third tremor at the Preston New Road site in a week after a 1.55-magnitude tremor was recorded last Wednesday.

Routine policy states hydraulic fracturing, better known as fracking, is paused for 18 hours following any tremors larger than 0.5 on the scale.

However all work on the site had been suspended following Saturday’s tremor to allow for an investigation by the Oil and Gas Authority.

The Oil and Gas Authority said: “Operations will remain suspended while the OGA gathers data from this and other recent seismic events and then considers carefully whether or not the hydraulic fracturing operations, mitigations and assumptions set out in the operator’s Hydraulic Fracture Plan continue to be appropriate to manage the risk of induced seismicity at the Preston New Road site.”

Control

The firm said in a statement: “Cuadrilla is aware of a seismic event which occurred at about 8.30am this morning in the area of our exploration site in Preston New Road, near Blackpool.

“We can confirm that no hydraulic fracturing was being carried out at the time and no hydraulic fracturing has been carried out over the weekend. We are investigating the event alongside the regulators who monitor Preston New Road.”

Environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth has called for a complete fracking ban after the three large tremors.

Spokesman Jamie Peters said: “This issue of earthquakes in connection to unwanted fracking has always been serious but now it is getting out of hand.

“It’s clearly not under control and at this point there is only one thing that can fix this situation: a ban, right now.”

Interrupted

According to the campaign group, residents heard a “guttural roar” as the earthquake hit.

Heather Goodwin, a resident of Lytham St Anne’s near the plant said: “The walls of my house shook, there was a really deep, guttural roar. For a moment, I really thought my house was going to fall down.

“It only lasted a few seconds but I felt the need to go all round the house and check for damage. We’ve been afraid of this happening. How long before there’s real damage done and people injured?”

Cuadrilla began fracking at the Preston New Road site last year, but work has been interrupted by tremors from the site.

This Author

Jess Glass is a reporter with PA.

Labour has called for a ban on the importation of hunting trophies of threatened species.

Shadow environment secretary Sue Hayman said it is “cruel and indefensible” for a “few wealthy hunters” to bring such items into the UK.

Ms Hayman said it was wrong for hunters to import horns, antlers, hides or heads and display them as trophies.

Trophies

She said: “Shooting and importing animals so that their heads, antlers and skins can adorn the trophy rooms of a few wealthy hunters is cruel and indefensible.

“The trade is exacerbating the decline of threatened species and brings unnecessary suffering to animals.

“Labour is the party that introduced the Hunting Act and by working with the general public, conservation charities and animal rights organisations on our animal welfare manifesto, we will be the party to end the import of trophy animals.”

Eduardo Goncalves of the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting said: “Trophy hunting is cruel, immoral and is devastating some of the world’s most endangered animals.”

Labour said that at present the import of hunting trophies is legal as long as the animal is licensed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES).

Banning

Ms Hayman said the proposed new ban would cover species classed as vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered and extinct in the wild.

The move forms part of Labour’s 50-point animal welfare manifesto.

Environment Secretary Theresa Villiers said: “These are empty promises which Labour would not be able to deliver on.

“Boris Johnson and the Conservatives are already taking action to stop the import of wild animal trophies from endangered species.

“Delivering Brexit presents the opportunity to strengthen our position as a world leader on animal welfare; we will be able to take further action such as banning live animal exports – an opportunity which Labour would not seize because they want to stop Brexit.”

This Author

Shaun Connolly is the PA political correspondent. 

The UK has now gone an entire week without burning coal to produce electricity – for the first time since 1882. Solar panels and offshore wind farms took much of the credit for the event earlier this year, but far less attention was accorded to an increasingly vital source of renewable electricity: wood pellets.

Burning wood pellets to generate electricity is about 10–35 percent less efficient than burning coal. Since carbon dioxide released by wood pellets can theoretically be compensated for if trees are regrown on the same land after they have been harvested, however, their use is currently subsidised by the UK Government.

Around eight million tonnes of wood pellets were burned to generate electricity in the UK in 2018, almost all of them produced from trees growing in forests located abroad. In fact, 4.8 million tonnes of wood pellets were imported from the US alone, most of these being produced from the extensive forests of the US south.

Rapid growth

Much of this region’s 250 million acres of forest is explicitly referred to as ‘working forest’ – having long been used to produce paper, furniture, construction materials and other commodities.

Timber harvests in the region have increased significantly in the past 50 years. But wood pellet production in the region has itself grown rapidly, from almost nothing in the early 2000s, to around 10 million tonnes in 2017. In this context, concerns about the industry’s environmental impacts are running high.

In July this year, and despite concern that it could drive forest degradation and generate air pollution, regulators granted permission for a $140-million wood pellet plant to enter operation in the city of Lucedale, Mississippi.

The plant will produce 1.4 million tonnes of wood pellets each year, making it the largest facility in the world, and the latest addition to a tranche of more than 20 plants now operating across 11 states stretching from Texas in the west to Virginia and the Carolinas in the east.

‘Working’ forests?

Protagonists of wood pellet manufacturing insist that this new industry is good news both for the region’s forests, and for its people.

For one thing, strong markets for forest products incentivise landowners to keep forest as forest—or at least as ‘working forest’—reducing the likelihood of incursions from urban development or agriculture. And the industry generates employment; the Lucedale wood pellet plant, for example, will employ 90 workers, and could generate many more jobs indirectly.

When it comes to climate change specifically though, it matters that wood pellet manufacturing generates demandspecifically for smaller-diameter trees and forestry residues, historically the mainstay of a paper industry currently undergoing painful restructuring. 

Healthy markets for these kinds of wood push landowners to overplant their forests with many more trees than can be supported through to full saw-log size. As these trees grow and start to encroach on one another, the forest can then be ‘thinned’ out and sold to wood pellet plants or paper mills, enabling landowners to derive intermediate income many years before they will eventually go on to sell larger trees to sawtimber mills for the construction and furniture industries.

Crucially, protagonists of wood pellet manufacturing argue that because smaller trees grow faster than their older counterparts, they are also more efficient at sequestering carbon. Actively managing working forests to produce both wood pellets and other commodities might therefore enhance, at least in theory, the rate at which those forests draw carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere.

Environmental concerns

But the view being advanced here is not one of forests contributing to climate change mitigation by permanently storing carbon themselves. Rather, it is one of forests working harder to transfer carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into diverse forms elsewhere, whether as fuel, paper, furniture, or more permanent elements of the built environment. In short, these forests are not carbon sinks, but carbon conveyors.

Opponents of wood pellet manufacturing in the US South point to studies showing that it still takes many decadesto recoup the carbon emissions which are ultimately generated by burning wood pellets for electricity—time which countries cannot afford to waste if average global temperature increases are to be kept below 1.5, or even 2, degrees Celsius.

With regard to wider environmental impacts meanwhile, it matters not only that the working forests on which wood pellet producers rely are generally less biodiverse than older, unmanaged forests. There are also accusations that the industry is incentivising the clear-cutting of mature trees in ecologically sensitive landscapes, like the bottomland hardwood forests of the region’s coastal plains.

Furthermore, the impacts of wood pellet production itself—for instance in the form of air pollutants generated by the facilities which process trees into a pelletized form—are said to be borne disproportionately by low-income communities where rates of social exclusion and ill health are already very high.

In this context, it is perhaps little wonder that campaigners have argued for badly-needed new jobs in the region to be linked not to wood pellet manufacturing, but rather to investment in alternatives such as solar and wind power.

Future fuels?

Efforts to highlight the environmental and social costs of wood pellet manufacturing in the US South are vital, of course. But there is a more fundamental question at stake here as well. This is the question of what kind of future the working forests of the US South should ultimately be working for.

In making the case for working forests of the US South to be seen as climate-friendly sources of renewable electricity, protagonists of wood pellet manufacturing advocate replacing older, slower-growing trees with younger, faster-growing ones. In so doing, they impose upon forests a logic of value as something that is best derived from productivity increase, hard work, and perpetual growth. 

But this logic of value has its roots not in the ‘nature’ of forests themselves, but rather, as Cara Daggett has recently shown, in the industrial revolution and its promise of development and prosperity driven by the intensive exploitation of new-found fossil energy reserves.

There is no reason why abandoning fossil fuels should not also entail abandoning the idea that prosperity and energy consumption are necessarily linked.  

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with making use of forests, of course—such practices have underpinned all civilisations, industrial and preindustrial. But there is also nothing which dictates that forests of the future should have to do the work previously performed by fossil fuels. And there is certainly nothing about the trees of the US South specifically that makes them ‘natural’ sources of renewable electricity for the UK.

Collective objectives 

So regardless of the precise social and environmental impacts of wood pellet manufacturing, local communities in the US South—including not only businesses, landowners and foresters, but wider citizens too—should still have an opportunity to redefine the collective objectives the forests and communities in the region should be working towards.

After all, if the wood pellet industry doesn’t offer the right kinds of jobs for the region’s people, it stands to reason that it probably doesn’t offer the right kinds of jobs for the region’s trees either.

This Author 

Dr James Palmer is Vice Chancellor’s Fellow in Environmental Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Bristol.

Image: US Department of Agriculture, Flickr.