Activists entered and occupied machinery in Field House mine and blockaded Shotton mine yesterday.

Their aim was to stop the mining companies from continuing to dig up coal, destroying the surrounding environment and contributing to the climate catastrophe.

People taking action come from the North East, around the UK and abroad.

Continued extraction

Opencast coal mining is strongly resisted in the “desolate North”, an area that has become a sacrifice zone for continued economic growth at the cost of the global climate, local environment and community health.

The region supplies the UK’s dirty power stations, leading CO2 emitters, while people in the global South are suffering the consequences. Even in the UK we are starting to see the impacts of climate change such as flooding and the expected sea level rise will affect coastal areas around the country.

Field House opencast started in 2018 and is operated by Hargreaves. The exact destination or power stations that the coal is being transported to is unknown. Machinery inside the mine was occupied, despite violent attacks by security.

Coal provided just 5.3 percent of the electricity generated in the UK in 2018. Recent research by Friends of the Earth has shown that already, enough coal is held in stockpiles in the UK to last until 2025, the date by which the UK government has committed to phasing out coal.

Yet, it allows for continued extraction, expansion and even proposals for 2 new coal mines to go ahead.

Green capitalism

Coal burning is one of the main contributors to climate change. It also destroys valuable habitat and impacts air quality where it is dug and where it is burnt.

The Bradley mine in the Pont Valley, Durham violated European and UK nature conservation legislation by destroying Great Crested Newt habitat.

We need to stop importing coal, and we need to stop digging it up in the UK now. Fracking, biomass, gas and nuclear are not solutions either. Neither do we want large-scale, corporate-controlled renewable energy installations that rely on the mining of rare metals elsewhere to power industrial so-called “development”. Green capitalism is not the answer.

Instead, we have to work towards radically different, locally and communally controlled, off-grid solutions that involve the use of DIY technologies made with recycled materials.

These solutions need to be coupled with a drastic reduction in energy consumption, and a wider, radical opposition to our capitalist plutocracy.

Such systems can then be embedded in non-hierarchically organised sharing economies that operate according to principles of mutual aid and solidarity.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is The Ecologist’s content editor. This article is based on a press release from Earth First! For updates follow @earthfirst_uk on Twitter. 

EarthFirst! is a platform for people to take direct action against the destruction of the earth. They adhere to principles of non-hierarchical organisation and the use of direct action to confront, stop and reverse the destruction of the earth.

Sea walls built by the UN in the capital of Tanzania are facing criticism for protecting a prestigious institution, while the most vulnerable communities are left to cope with increasing coastal erosion themselves.

The walls were planned and built by the UN Environmental Programme, in consultation with the Tanzanian government. Funded by the Adaptation Fund (AF), aiming to help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, one of the two walls finished last year was placed to protect the prestigious Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy.

Jon Garcia, environmental consultant and the main author of an independent assessment of the sea wall plans, said: “This seawall benefits few non-poor households and an area of no particular environmental interest.”

The other wall runs around the central Ocean Road, connecting research institutes and governmental buildings.

‘Symbols of power’

Betsy A. Beymer-Farris, director of environmental and sustainability studies at the University of Kentucky, who has researched the politics of UN coastal adaptation projects in Tanzania, said: “I think the seawalls built in Dar are symbolic of power. I find that really unfortunate because the amount of money that has been spent could have been used in so many better ways.”

Part of the AF money was used for mangrove plantations, coral rehabilitation and a drainage system, but the biggest share, 2.5 million dollars, was reserved to the 1450 meters of concrete seawalls. The measures aim to protect one of Africa’s fastest growing cities from destructive effects of coastal erosion, fuelled among others by climate change and rapid urbanisation.

While the poor are expected to suffer most from changing climate and natural hazards, “it is certainly often the case that adaptation interventions disproportionately benefit wealthier groups,” explains Dr. David Dodman of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London and an expert on climate change vulnerability in urban areas of eastern Africa.

In Dar es Salaam, communities of small-scale fishermen struggle with disappearing land, damaged boats and flooded huts on a regular basis.

Lawrence Kiragale, 39, has been working as a fisherman for the past eleven years. Every morning after a night on the sea, he returns to his small wooden house at the Kigamboni beach in central Dar es Salaam, where he sleeps and stores his equipment. “The water eats the land, the shore used to be down there but now it has disappeared. I put tires in the sand here to protect my office and the sand from the waves. It helps, but soon I must move,” says Lawrence. 

Government priorities

A short walk from Lawrence’s office lies the Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy. Founded by Julius Nyerere, the first president of independent Tanzania, it has a great historical and cultural value for the country. Called Ideological College between 1971 and 1992, the university has also been a particularly strategic institution for the Government, “best suited to inculcate the Party Ideology.”

Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) was the only legal political party until 1992 when Tanzania adopted the multiparty system. Before the transition, TANU was transformed into CCM or “Party of The Revolution”, which has been ruling ever since. Although Tanzania is a unitary presidential democracy, the current head of state John Magufuli has been criticized for governing in an increasingly authoritarian style.

Dr. Yohanna Shaghude, coastal erosion expert at the University of Dar es Salaam, is well-aware of the extensive problems of receding coast. “The Academy is an important public infrastructure with very important historical and political values, and it was highly under threat of erosion,” he says. “Many areas in Dar were important [to protect], but you have to choose. And the Government is its own priority.”

The seaside part of the campus comprises the oldest Academy building and seven staff houses. Ukende Mkumbo, the dean of students, lives in one of them. “Trees were falling down and even some houses were on their way to collapse. But now, people are just living happily, enjoying the ocean breeze,” she explains the impact of the new infrastructure.

The wall continues around a desolate area that belongs to the Tanzanian Fisheries Corporation (TAFICO), part of the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries.

“The Fisheries Corporation and all its offices belong to the government, so they saw the need to build a wall both around the Academy and the Fishing Company,” adds Mkumbo. An encountered TAFICO employee confirmed that three workers in the main office and a couple of guards are currently the only population protected by that seawall.

Tires and garbage

Ian Bryceson, coastal ecology professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, who grew up and worked in Dar es Salaam as a marine biologist, called the seawalls a “prestige thing. I mean, the college and the Ocean Road, those are very prestigious places. But not necessarily the places where most people are currently under threat”.

Bryceson mentions the northern part of Dar es Salaam as a place where the situation is more problematic: “In Msasani Bay and up to Kunduchi, the rich hotels put huge groins made of rocks on the beach to protect the sand from going away. The groins grab sand and then cause a deficit to nearby places. Now the village has experienced a lot of erosion.”

In Kunduchi, bags of rubbish, cans and bottles are packed and tied to the shore with a green plastic net. Some of the villagers use all the means at hand to create their own coastal protection.

Joseph Paul, 63 years old Kunduchi resident, says: “We do not have the money to buy stones, so people put this instead. Sometimes the water comes into the village, and the fish market is all covered. It is very bad for the village, it affects the buildings and the fishermen.”

Thousands of people, both men and women depend on this village, he says. “Now we are waiting for the government. They say they are going to help us but nobody has come yet. It is the same every year.”

Rebuilding seawalls

Mara Baviera, UNEP Task Manager responsible for coordination of the project, argues that “the academy is a public school and the Ocean Road is an important transport pathway in the city.” When asked what other sites were considered, she referred to technical and practical matters. “Our starting point was to rebuild old seawalls, we did not have funding to conduct studies on geological vulnerability to erosion.”

Dr. Sam Barrett from the IIED, who researches on adaptation finance allocation in the least developed states, confirms that adaptation funding often doesn’t find its way to the most vulnerable groups. “Around 2009, there was a decision whether to go down the road of institutional support or to go for a pro-poor, community level framing for all adaptation projects. And the UN basically chose the institutional support which doesn’t necessarily serve the needs of the poorest,” explains Barrett.

According to the project plan written by the UNEP and the Tanzanian Vice-President’s Office, local municipal councils, NGOs and key Government Ministries were involved in the decision-making process. But information about why the Memorial Academy and the Ocean Road were chosen over other areas, remains unclear.

This Author

Michaela Kozminova (@kozmisha) is a freelance environmental journalist from the Czech Republic, Elias Arvidsson is a Swedish freelance journalist focusing on culture and environmental issues.

It often takes a disaster or a near miss before we change the way we do things as a society. The Whaley Bridge dam incident saw the concrete slipway to a reservoir above the town damaged by heavy rain and put the dam at risk of collapse which could have seen the town catastrophically flooded. 

This was one more warning that we need to change the that way we think about how we manage water – our most essential but potentially destructive resource.

The British seem to have always been talking about the rain. Feste, the clown in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, sings “the rain it raineth every day”. When this particular dam was built in 1841 it was a time when we were obsessed with controlling water, putting it behind walls and in pipes. Since then we have seen a continual loss of trees which soak up water, and the concreting of our habitats which makes water flow more quickly and causes floods.

Natural defences 

We know now that controlling water isn’t about more concrete, more walls and more pipes. It is too big a force. The best way we can handle our water is by helping nature do what it does best and only using engineering as a last resort. 

Planting more trees and reintroducing forests means that rainwater flows far more slowly to our town as cities. It also has the added benefit of rebuilding our natural habitats for our native species.

Natural flood defences can also regulate a river’s flow by recreating the work of Beavers that we lost due to them being hunted to extinction and gained where they are now being reintroduced. 

The fact that developers are proposing concreting more of Whaley Bridge for housing implies we may not have learned our lessons yet.

Old man-made structures on our rivers and waterways need reevaluating, especially given the recent warning by the Committee on Climate Change that has highlighted how roads, bridges and dams  are vulnerable, a situation that will be exacerbated by how interdependent these structures are. 

Wake-up call

Then there is climate change. The rain we are used to in Britain is generally relative soft and gentle, moderate. But our weather is becoming more extreme and our Victorian engineering may not always be able to cope. Bigger dams are not the answer.

Around the world, rain is an increasingly frequent subject of conversation, although for many as a report published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) illustrated, it is lack that is the problem: the supply of water, and sometimes its oversupply, is becoming the prism through which it is possible to see the many dangerous faces of the climate emergency. 

Too much and too little water are two sides of the same coin and the one issue can’t be dealt with unless we address the other. There is only so much water to go around and too much for one place can mean too little in another.

This WRI report shows how a quarter of the world’s population are living in regions of extremely high water stress. Qatar, Israel and Lebanon were ranked as the most water-stressed countries in the world. A scarcity that will lead to droughts, described by the World Bank as “misery in slow motion” with the impact of droughts felt for generations. 

This is a wake-up call that can no longer go unheard. Water should be treated like the valuable and exhaustible resource that it is, and maximum possible preparations made to provide insurance against its excess.

Investment 

We need to think carefully about what investment in infrastructure that is needed and ensure our country has the skills and desire to think in new innovative ways. 

The way we build homes needs to change to ensure water routes are taken into account. The building of vast concrete structures such as motorways and airports needs to be urgently curtailed due to the destruction they cause, and the fact they promote carbon-intensive activity feeding into climate change.

Our mountains and hills need reforestation on a major scale and finally we need to ensure we think of this in terms of changes to our economic system, which currently prioritises destruction over sustainability and quality of life.

This Author 

Amelia Womack is deputy leader of the Green Party. 

Image: Dam News, Twitter. 

Sea walls built by the UN in the capital of Tanzania are facing criticism for protecting a prestigious institution, while the most vulnerable communities are left to cope with increasing coastal erosion themselves.

The walls were planned and built by the UN Environmental Programme, in consultation with the Tanzanian government. Funded by the Adaptation Fund (AF), aiming to help vulnerable communities adapt to climate change, one of the two walls finished last year was placed to protect the prestigious Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy.

Jon Garcia, environmental consultant and the main author of an independent assessment of the sea wall plans, said: “This seawall benefits few non-poor households and an area of no particular environmental interest.”

The other wall runs around the central Ocean Road, connecting research institutes and governmental buildings.

‘Symbols of power’

Betsy A. Beymer-Farris, director of environmental and sustainability studies at the University of Kentucky, who has researched the politics of UN coastal adaptation projects in Tanzania, said: “I think the seawalls built in Dar are symbolic of power. I find that really unfortunate because the amount of money that has been spent could have been used in so many better ways.”

Part of the AF money was used for mangrove plantations, coral rehabilitation and a drainage system, but the biggest share, 2.5 million dollars, was reserved to the 1450 meters of concrete seawalls. The measures aim to protect one of Africa’s fastest growing cities from destructive effects of coastal erosion, fuelled among others by climate change and rapid urbanisation.

While the poor are expected to suffer most from changing climate and natural hazards, “it is certainly often the case that adaptation interventions disproportionately benefit wealthier groups,” explains Dr. David Dodman of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London and an expert on climate change vulnerability in urban areas of eastern Africa.

In Dar es Salaam, communities of small-scale fishermen struggle with disappearing land, damaged boats and flooded huts on a regular basis.

Lawrence Kiragale, 39, has been working as a fisherman for the past eleven years. Every morning after a night on the sea, he returns to his small wooden house at the Kigamboni beach in central Dar es Salaam, where he sleeps and stores his equipment. “The water eats the land, the shore used to be down there but now it has disappeared. I put tires in the sand here to protect my office and the sand from the waves. It helps, but soon I must move,” says Lawrence. 

Government priorities

A short walk from Lawrence’s office lies the Mwalimu Nyerere Memorial Academy. Founded by Julius Nyerere, the first president of independent Tanzania, it has a great historical and cultural value for the country. Called Ideological College between 1971 and 1992, the university has also been a particularly strategic institution for the Government, “best suited to inculcate the Party Ideology.”

Nyerere’s Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) was the only legal political party until 1992 when Tanzania adopted the multiparty system. Before the transition, TANU was transformed into CCM or “Party of The Revolution”, which has been ruling ever since. Although Tanzania is a unitary presidential democracy, the current head of state John Magufuli has been criticized for governing in an increasingly authoritarian style.

Dr. Yohanna Shaghude, coastal erosion expert at the University of Dar es Salaam, is well-aware of the extensive problems of receding coast. “The Academy is an important public infrastructure with very important historical and political values, and it was highly under threat of erosion,” he says. “Many areas in Dar were important [to protect], but you have to choose. And the Government is its own priority.”

The seaside part of the campus comprises the oldest Academy building and seven staff houses. Ukende Mkumbo, the dean of students, lives in one of them. “Trees were falling down and even some houses were on their way to collapse. But now, people are just living happily, enjoying the ocean breeze,” she explains the impact of the new infrastructure.

The wall continues around a desolate area that belongs to the Tanzanian Fisheries Corporation (TAFICO), part of the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries.

“The Fisheries Corporation and all its offices belong to the government, so they saw the need to build a wall both around the Academy and the Fishing Company,” adds Mkumbo. An encountered TAFICO employee confirmed that three workers in the main office and a couple of guards are currently the only population protected by that seawall.

Tires and garbage

Ian Bryceson, coastal ecology professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, who grew up and worked in Dar es Salaam as a marine biologist, called the seawalls a “prestige thing. I mean, the college and the Ocean Road, those are very prestigious places. But not necessarily the places where most people are currently under threat”.

Bryceson mentions the northern part of Dar es Salaam as a place where the situation is more problematic: “In Msasani Bay and up to Kunduchi, the rich hotels put huge groins made of rocks on the beach to protect the sand from going away. The groins grab sand and then cause a deficit to nearby places. Now the village has experienced a lot of erosion.”

In Kunduchi, bags of rubbish, cans and bottles are packed and tied to the shore with a green plastic net. Some of the villagers use all the means at hand to create their own coastal protection.

Joseph Paul, 63 years old Kunduchi resident, says: “We do not have the money to buy stones, so people put this instead. Sometimes the water comes into the village, and the fish market is all covered. It is very bad for the village, it affects the buildings and the fishermen.”

Thousands of people, both men and women depend on this village, he says. “Now we are waiting for the government. They say they are going to help us but nobody has come yet. It is the same every year.”

Rebuilding seawalls

Mara Baviera, UNEP Task Manager responsible for coordination of the project, argues that “the academy is a public school and the Ocean Road is an important transport pathway in the city.” When asked what other sites were considered, she referred to technical and practical matters. “Our starting point was to rebuild old seawalls, we did not have funding to conduct studies on geological vulnerability to erosion.”

Dr. Sam Barrett from the IIED, who researches on adaptation finance allocation in the least developed states, confirms that adaptation funding often doesn’t find its way to the most vulnerable groups. “Around 2009, there was a decision whether to go down the road of institutional support or to go for a pro-poor, community level framing for all adaptation projects. And the UN basically chose the institutional support which doesn’t necessarily serve the needs of the poorest,” explains Barrett.

According to the project plan written by the UNEP and the Tanzanian Vice-President’s Office, local municipal councils, NGOs and key Government Ministries were involved in the decision-making process. But information about why the Memorial Academy and the Ocean Road were chosen over other areas, remains unclear.

This Author

Michaela Kozminova (@kozmisha) is a freelance environmental journalist from the Czech Republic, Elias Arvidsson is a Swedish freelance journalist focusing on culture and environmental issues.

It often takes a disaster or a near miss before we change the way we do things as a society. The Whaley Bridge dam incident saw the concrete slipway to a reservoir above the town damaged by heavy rain and put the dam at risk of collapse which could have seen the town catastrophically flooded. 

This was one more warning that we need to change the that way we think about how we manage water – our most essential but potentially destructive resource.

The British seem to have always been talking about the rain. Feste, the clown in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, sings “the rain it raineth every day”. When this particular dam was built in 1841 it was a time when we were obsessed with controlling water, putting it behind walls and in pipes. Since then we have seen a continual loss of trees which soak up water, and the concreting of our habitats which makes water flow more quickly and causes floods.

Natural defences 

We know now that controlling water isn’t about more concrete, more walls and more pipes. It is too big a force. The best way we can handle our water is by helping nature do what it does best and only using engineering as a last resort. 

Planting more trees and reintroducing forests means that rainwater flows far more slowly to our town as cities. It also has the added benefit of rebuilding our natural habitats for our native species.

Natural flood defences can also regulate a river’s flow by recreating the work of Beavers that we lost due to them being hunted to extinction and gained where they are now being reintroduced. 

The fact that developers are proposing concreting more of Whaley Bridge for housing implies we may not have learned our lessons yet.

Old man-made structures on our rivers and waterways need reevaluating, especially given the recent warning by the Committee on Climate Change that has highlighted how roads, bridges and dams  are vulnerable, a situation that will be exacerbated by how interdependent these structures are. 

Wake-up call

Then there is climate change. The rain we are used to in Britain is generally relative soft and gentle, moderate. But our weather is becoming more extreme and our Victorian engineering may not always be able to cope. Bigger dams are not the answer.

Around the world, rain is an increasingly frequent subject of conversation, although for many as a report published by the World Resources Institute (WRI) illustrated, it is lack that is the problem: the supply of water, and sometimes its oversupply, is becoming the prism through which it is possible to see the many dangerous faces of the climate emergency. 

Too much and too little water are two sides of the same coin and the one issue can’t be dealt with unless we address the other. There is only so much water to go around and too much for one place can mean too little in another.

This WRI report shows how a quarter of the world’s population are living in regions of extremely high water stress. Qatar, Israel and Lebanon were ranked as the most water-stressed countries in the world. A scarcity that will lead to droughts, described by the World Bank as “misery in slow motion” with the impact of droughts felt for generations. 

This is a wake-up call that can no longer go unheard. Water should be treated like the valuable and exhaustible resource that it is, and maximum possible preparations made to provide insurance against its excess.

Investment 

We need to think carefully about what investment in infrastructure that is needed and ensure our country has the skills and desire to think in new innovative ways. 

The way we build homes needs to change to ensure water routes are taken into account. The building of vast concrete structures such as motorways and airports needs to be urgently curtailed due to the destruction they cause, and the fact they promote carbon-intensive activity feeding into climate change.

Our mountains and hills need reforestation on a major scale and finally we need to ensure we think of this in terms of changes to our economic system, which currently prioritises destruction over sustainability and quality of life.

This Author 

Amelia Womack is deputy leader of the Green Party. 

Image: Dam News, Twitter. 

The newly elected conservative government in Greece has announced its intention to fast track the licensing process for hydrocarbon prospecting in an ecologically vulnerable area of the Mediterranean. The government will immediately introduce four previously signed contracts for ratification in parliament.

On and offshore concessions run from Corfu to Crete west of mainland Greece. They are seen as a panacea for Greek economic woes. Ceded blocks cross or are adjacent to important Natura 2000 conservation sites: these include the National Marine Park of Zyknathosthe National Park of Kotychi-Strofilia, the Messolongi lagoons (Ramsar site and national park), the Amvrakikos lagoons (Ramsar site and national park), and the marine area of Kyparissia. High value conservation habitats include Posidonia oceanica (seagrass) meadows, coastal lagoons, and rocky reefs with coralligenous formations.

The 600 kilometer long Hellenic Trench is a designated Important Marine Mammal Area (IMMA) that runs along the Ionian Sea to wrap around the island of Crete in the south. It is the deepest part of the Mediterranean reaching up to 5,200 meters. This is home to several vulnerable protected species and deep diving marine mammals: rare Mediterranean Monk seal, Striped dolphin, the Common dolphin, the Sperm whale, the Cuvier’s beaked whale, Fin whale, the loggerhead sea turtle, and the Noble pen shell. 

Seismic blasting

Most of these animals are extremely sensitive to sound. Seismic airgun blasting is already killing marine life: in January this year an unprecedented number of loggerhead turtles were washed up at the same time on Israel’s coast. Initial findings from leading scientists in the field indicate seismic tests are responsible.

Mediterranean Sperm whales are genetically unique. The isolated subpopulation of the Hellenic Trench numbers some 60 individuals and is the largest concentration in the Eastern Mediterranean. They are severely impacted by one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world: carcasses are regularly washed up, either sliced up by propellers, poisoned by plastics or drowned by illegal monofilament driftnets. Further stress, initially from seismic testing but later from disorienting drilling, could see the numbers of this endangered population fall below a level where it can guarantee its survival. 

But opposition to hydrocarbon concessions amongst Ionian Islanders is mounting as awareness of the impacts on its economy and ecology spread. 

A ‘No Oil’ concert held by the Kefalonia-Ithaca Open Assembly against Hydrocarbon Extraction organised a ‘No Oil’ concert attracted thousands in the popular tourist port of Sami on a balmy evening at the end of July. The town is close to the glorious beach of Antisamos filmed in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and numbers of supportive visitors were attracted to the event. Tourists in this hauntingly beautiful coast temporarily stepped aside from their roles to acknowledge the pandemic nature of a planet in crisis. 

The event was coordinated with the arrival of the WWF’s research ship, the Blue Panda, linking opposition across the islands and playing a key educational role.

Risky strategy 

Dimitris Ibrahim, head of the WWF Greece campaign against hydrocarbons explains that the vast majority of islanders oppose oil drilling. It encourages visitors and sets up information stands wherever it docks. It provides a place to meet local tourist boards, government and other administrative representatives and offers live aboard opportunities for journalists and researchers.

An economic impact study commissioned by WWF and produced by the UK environment consultancy EFTEC shows that there are potentially disastrous consequences of a major oil spill and high economic costs for the more likely minor spills. 75% of theIonian Islands’ economies are dependent on tourism and an accident could incur losses to the area of €6 billion.

Ibrahim said: “Drilling at these depths and barometric pressures and in an earthquake prone zone is extremely risk.”. The Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico of 2010 resulted from drilling at a depth of 1500meters. “These are not just deep waters; these are ultra deep waters,” Ibrahim stresses. “If there is an oil spill it is impossible to predict where in the extensive Mediterranean coastline a spill will end up”. 

The policy began with the Conservative led coalition in 2011 to 12. The Syriza government under Alexis Tsipras vigorously pursued the lease of hydrocarbon concessions as a quick fix to the debt ridden Greek economy. Only a 5 percent return of company profits is expected for local economies but no income will be realized until as late as 2030; nothing is guaranteed and Islanders expect little economic return.

Companies and consortia including Total, Exxonmobil, Hellenic Petroleum and Energean have rushed to the Ionian Sea because of the easy entry. It is ironic that one of the first was Repsol, the Spanish oil company which faced widespread opposition to its controversial planned exploration in in The Canaries and Balaeric Islands and now faces a permanent ban in that area. 

Bypassing protocols 

The Greek Government has bypassed Environmental Impact Assessment procedures obliged by The Offshore Protocol of Barcelona Convention Ibrahim explains: “They have legislated for an entirely new mechanism: Environmental Action Plans, which we have never seen before. This is a private document compiled by the hydrocarbon company, authored by the company and controlled by the company. What the government does according to the legislation is accepts it; not approves, not rejects, but accepts whatever the companies publish”.

Just two days before the July 7th general election in Greece this year, Alexis Tsipras signed off two further key concessions in the Crete region. This was likely motivated by Turkish ships exploratory drilling off the coast of Cyprus. Conflict over rights to the newly discovered gas fields is raising international concern.

WWF is contesting in the Greek Council of State the hasty release of these concessions and is claiming key evidence submitted by environmental groups was overlooked. Ibrahim said: “It could be a game changer. The rush to carbon extraction is an ill-conceived strategy for Greece. The world is transitioning from fossil fuels. Greece has almost double the sunlight of the UK, but there has been zero growth in solar energy use in the last five years”.

However, under the new government led by the banking technocrat Kyriakos Mitsotakis on 6 August 6 in Athens, energy ministers from Greece, Israel and Cyprus, along with US Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources (former leading oil lobbyist) Francis Fannon cemented a new regional alliance. A miniscule reserve of of 10.9 million barrels in Katakolo could begin production next year while a more significant 150 million barrel block off the islands of Kefalonia and Ithaca are ready for feasibility drilling to see if the oil is recoverable. 

The grip of big oil money is tightening.

This Author 

David Greenhalgh is a construction consultant and an environmental campaigner who has worked for organisations including the Pacific Asia Resource Center and the World Conference Against A & H Bombs. 

Image: Local activists Elli Constantinou and Venetia Gigi – Sami, Kefalonia – No Oil concert. ©David Greenhalgh

MPs are to scrutinise the impact of trade policy on the environment, including in trade agreements following Brexit.

The International Trade Committee is to explore how the government can support positive environmental outcomes through trade policy, and how the negative environmental impacts of trade can be mitigated.

As part of this, the committee will examine how effectively existing free trade agreements address environmental issues, and consider how the government could implement its commitment, made in the 2017 Trade White Paper, to “the maintenance of high standards of […] environmental protection in trade agreements”.

Advantage

Committee chair and Scottish National Party MP Angus Brendan MacNeil said that producing and transporting goods for international trade could lead to environmental damage. However, increased trade could boost a country’s economic growth and access to new technologies which could be used to solve environmental problems, he said.

The committee will also consider how trade could be used to prevent climate change, an issue which had not been fully explored by policymakers, MacNeil added.

“My committee’s inquiry will look at this issue in depth, with a view to coming up with practical, implementable policy suggestions to ensure that the UK takes advantage of the potential for trade policy to support positive environmental outcomes.”

To find out more about the inquiry, and to submit evidence, click here.

This Author

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

Conservationists have carried out a survey of seabirds on the outlying islands of a remote archipelago for the first time in 20 years.

St Kilda, home to nearly one million seabirds, lies 40 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean to the west of the Outer Hebrides. Its last residents were evacuated in 1930.

The bird population has not been surveyed for two decades because it is so difficult to land on some of the islands.

Encouraging

But a team led by National Trust for Scotland (NTS) senior nature conservation adviser Richard Luxmoore succeeded in carrying out surveys on three of them last month.

Mr Luxmoore said: “When we saw the island, it was clear why it was 20 years since the bird population had been last surveyed.

“At first sight, Boreray looks completely inaccessible, rising through an impenetrable jumble of pinnacles and cliffs to 380 metres.

“It is accurately described as awesome. We had passed it on the way to Hirta and what we saw of the landing site was not encouraging.

“Even on a calm day, the Atlantic swell can run several metres up the sloping slab of rock whose size is belied by the scale of the island.

Researchers

“On the advice of the boatman, Angus Campbell, we chose to land in the evening – at high tide – as the band of seaweed-covered rock that we would have to cross would be narrowest.”

The eight-strong group spent five days on Boreray, surveying the population of birds such as puffins, Leach’s storm-petrels and Manx Shearwater.

They had to land on the island to carry out the survey as while cliff-nesting seabirds such as gannets, fulmars and guillemots can be counted from a boat, the burrow-nesting seabirds must be counted on the ground.

Puffins are relatively simple to count as their burrows are easy to detect due to debris left around the entrance but shearwaters and storm petrels are much more difficult and can only be located by playing recordings of their calls and listening for their response.

After five days on Boreray and a night back on the main island of Hirta, the researchers landed on Soay to count the birds there.

Uninhabited

Mr Luxmoore said: “It rained overnight, which made the landing place even more slippery and treacherous and necessitated the utmost caution. We took four hours to get off but achieved it safely and without incident.”

They also surveyed the bird population on the island of Dun. Mr Luxmoore said analysing the results of the survey is “a complex task” and it will be some time before the results are known.

St Kilda is the UK’s only dual Unesco World Heritage Site – for natural and cultural heritage – and is home to the UK’s largest colony of Atlantic puffins.

There was a community there for 4,000 years before it was evacuated on August 29 1930 after the remaining 36 islanders voted to leave as their way of life was no longer sustainable.

The uninhabited archipelago has been in the care of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS) since 1957

This Author

Lucinda Cameron is a reporter with PA Scotland.

The crude ‘bigger is better’ narrative has dominated economic thinking for centuries, but it is finally being challenged by a much gentler, more inclusive perspective that places human and ecological well-being front and centre.

People are coming to recognise that connection, both to others and to Nature, is the wellspring of human happiness. New, inspiring initiatives are springing up that offer the potential for genuine prosperity.

Only when we embrace a structural shift in the current economy – away from dependence on a corporate-run global marketplace, towards diversified local systems – will we be able to live in a way that reflects this understanding.

Automation

Tragically, our political and business leaders remain blind to these and other realities. They are taking us down a different path, one where biotechnology will feed the world, the internet will enable global cooperation, robots will free people from the drudgery of physical and mental effort, and where the wealth of an even richer 1 percent will somehow ‘trickle down’ to benefit the poor. 

What does this future look like? Google’s Ray Kurzweil informs us that our food will come from “AI-controlled vertical buildings” and include “in-vitro cloned meat”. According to Tesla’s Elon Musk, building a city on Mars is “the critical thing for maximising the life of humanity”, while “30 layers of tunnels” will relieve congestion in Earth’s high-density cities.

Goldman Sachs explains that the digitisation of everyday objects will “establish networks between machines, humans, and the internet, leading to the creation of new ecosystems that enable higher productivity, better energy efficiency, and higher profitability”.

These ideas are lauded as visionary and bold, but what they promise is simply the escalation of dominant trends – neo-colonial expansion, urbanisation and commodification – turbo-charged with fancy gadgets. 

What they don’t tell us is that, at every level, the system is dumping the most abundant natural resource of all – human energy and labour – on the waste heap. At the same time, our taxes are subsidising a dramatic increase in the use of energy and scarce natural resources. We have a system that is simultaneously creating mass unemployment, poverty and pollution.

Grassroots movements

But at the grassroots on every continent, people in their diverse cultures are rejecting this vision of the future.  They yearn for the deep bonds of community and connection to nature that we evolved with for most of our existence. Theirs is not a vision built upon a few billionaires’ fetish for high-tech gimmicks and knack for money-accumulation; instead it emerges from a deep experience of what it means to be human.

People are actively forging a different path – one that allows us to reweave the social fabric and to reconnect with the Earth and its ecosystems. They are building prosperous local economies and intergenerational communities that provide more meaningful, productive work.

From community gardens to farmers’ markets, from alternative learning spaces to local business alliances and co-ops – what all these have in common is a renewal of place-based relationships that reflect an enduring and innately human desire for love and connection. 

These localisation steps emphatically demonstrate that human nature is not the problem – on the contrary, it is the inhuman scale of a techno-economic monoculture that has infiltrated and manipulated our desires and our needs.

This understanding is reinforced by observing what happens when people come back into contact with human-scale structures; I have seen teenagers given meaning and purpose, depression healed, and social, ethnic and intergenerational rifts bridged. 

Unacountable monopolies

In many cases, these efforts stem more from common sense than any intention to ‘change the world’. But together they nevertheless present a powerful challenge to the corporate order, and articulate a very different vision of the future. 

This emerging movement transcends the conventional left-right dichotomy. It is about enabling diverse human values and dreams to flourish, while simultaneously re-embedding culture in nature.

It means that societies can move towards withdrawing their dependence on distant, unaccountable monopolies that produce our basic needs in high-input, mechanised monocultural systems on the other side of the world, in favour of local and artisanal production for local needs.

The emphasis here is on real needs, not the artificial wants created by marketers and advertisers in an effort to stoke the furnaces of consumerism and endless growth. 

Localisation means getting out of the highly unstable and exploitative bubbles of speculation and debt, and back to the real economy – our interface with other people and the natural world.

Diversity and meaning 

Rather than demanding countless tons of perfectly straight carrots and discarding the ones that do not fit the bill (as supermarket chains do), local markets require a diversity of products, and therefore create incentives for more diversified and ecological production.

This means more food with far less machinery and chemicals, more hands on the land and therefore more meaningful employment. It means dramatically reduced CO2emissions, no need for plastic packaging, more space for wild biodiversity, more circulation of wealth within local communities, more face-to-face conversations between producers and consumers and more flourishing cultures founded on genuine interdependence. 

When we strengthen the human-scale economy, decision-making itself is transformed. Not only do we create systems that are small enough for us to influence, but we also embed ourselves within a web of relationships that informs our actions and perspectives at a deep level.

The increased visibility of our impacts on community and local ecosystems leads to experiential awareness, enabling us to become both more empowered to make change and more humbled by the complexity of life around us. 

Localisation lends us the intimacy and pace required to feel this fullness, and to feel the joy of being an integral part of a living web of relationships. 

Two paths

The two paths before us lead in radically different directions. One takes us relentlessly towards fast-paced, large-scale, monocultural, techno-development. It’s a path that separates us from each other and the natural world, and accelerates our downward social and ecological decline.

The other path is about slowing down, scaling back and fostering deep connection, in order to restore the social and economic structures essential for meeting our material and deeper human needs in ways that nurture the only planet we have.

This Author 

Helena Norberg-Hodge is the author of Ancient Futures and producer of the award-winning documentary, The Economics of Happiness. Her new book Local is Our Future: Steps to an Economics of Happiness, just published, reveals the root causes of our current global breakdown and describes how simple steps towards the local can lead to a sustainable and fulfilling future for people and planet.

James Thornton is not what you expect from a New York lawyer. He has a soft lyrical voice; each statement he makes is carefully balanced and deeply considered; he practices Buddhism, is gay, and drinks green tea.

But he is fierce. This one man poses the greatest threat to polluting companies operating in Europe. Is this hyperbole? Well, the founder of ClientEarth was presented with the Financial Times’ Special Achievement Award at the Innovative Lawyer Awards in 2016, and has been named as one of ten people who could change the world by the New Statesman. He has been working with high ranking Chinese officials to revolutionise environmental law across one of the world’s biggest economies. These and grander accolades fill his Wikipedia entry.

ClientEarth is a not-for-profit environmental law firm that now has offices in London, Brussels, Warsaw, Berlin and Beijing. Thornton is perhaps best known for the Clean Air Campaign, in which he brought the UK Government to the Supreme Court for “failing to protect its citizens against air pollution”. Aspects of the case were taken up by the Court of Justice of the EU leading the way to further suits against companies across the continent.

Transforming practice

Thornton’s aim is, simply, “to save civilisation”, he told me during an interview at his modest office in Hackney, east London. His method is fundamentally transforming the practice of environmental law in the UK. And, in this, he is succeeding.

He is fighting to get the UK government to accept in full the European Aarhus Convention. This would ensure our rights as citizens to access justice without it being prohibitively expensive. In particular, environmentalists who lose cases brought against polluters would not be buried under millions in legal costs.

“My view of the world is – as the Chinese say – crisis / opportunity. The crisis is now more clear than it has ever been. We have seen the emerging crisis – as I did when I was at university, which is a long time ago now. With each passing year it becomes more obvious.

“When you have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change saying we have 12 years to make a serious shift if we want to save civilisation essentially – that’s a turning point in culture. I now feel that the job is really saving civilisation. If you want to save civilisation you have to take care of the environment, because civilisation depends on the environment. It’s the most obvious thing.”

Transforming civilization

Thornton goes on: “The crisis is more clear because things have got much worse since I began, in terms of climate change, loss of biodiversity has accelerated enormously in the last 30 years. I try and carefully monitor the science in all these areas as much as I can. I have been watching the earth warm and these species die my entire adult lifetime.

“How can you go on – and the answer is that you can go on if you dedicate yourself to saving civilisation. And then, ‘is it possible to do that’?”

This tireless campaigning has placed James at the intersection between those members of the public most concerned about the environment, corporate power and the government, and its legal system.

His high-level strategic approach and exhaustive knowledge of the detail of UK law means there are perhaps few who understand the interplay of power in the UK today as well as he does.

Brexit and China

James has commanded a front row seat as the theatre of Brexit has unfolded, and his review is damning. He is keen to share what he has learned about Brexit with anyone keen to learn.

He also holds a particular interest in China, and has spent a considerable amount of time working with Chinese officials and legal professionals in implementing what the Chinese Communist Party has called the Ecological Civilisation through the reform of its legal system. There is much to be gained from comparing Brexit UK with China in terms of how each country is acting on the existential threat of climate breakdown.

Let’s begin at home. The unfolding calamity of Brexit has already had profound and long lasting impacts on environmental regulation in the UK, and we are only just at the beginning of this process. James begins by expressing dismay: “My greatest sadness is that a great country is leaving the stage.

“Britain has had an enormously positive and powerful impact in Europe even though it has always had this love-hate relationship in terms of environmental regulation. And one of the successes of the European project has been environmental regulation. The standards today are much higher than if the countries had made it on their own. The ambitions set were very high. Britain, even when it has resisted new regulation, is often better than other countries at following the rules – its part of the national character.”

Environmental protections

The fear is that if Britain continues with Brexit, it will no longer be beholden to European regulations and our air, our rivers, are farmland and our cities will be damaged as a result.

Brexit will inevitably have a profoundly negative impact on environmental regulations in the UK, he warns. “Even with good intentions there will be so much chaos in terms of law and rule making in the UK that environmental regulation will not be the main focus and that the environment will therefore suffer”. Further, “the big industrial players will always argue for reduced regulation.”

The direct threat of Brexit is that the act of transferring vast swathes of EU regulation into British law will allow corporations – incumbent economic actors – with little regard for environmental concerns to gut these rules from the inside. This can be clearly understood with reference to the work ClientEarth has done on clean air.

“The negative economic consequences will make it harder to protect the environment. Will the government do what it says in retaining environmental standards? There is an opportunity – we could do even better. But there is a risk that the attention will be attention will be elsewhere, the focus will not be on protecting the environment.

“The government isn’t really coping even with the negotiations, let alone the reality. When the reality hits, will there be strong focus be on protecting the environment. One can hope so, one can argue how things could be better. But I doubt it. It is going to take a lot of work by citizens demanding environmental protection.”

Clean air

James confirms that Britain leaving the negotiating table could also mean that the more progressive European countries will lose an important ally in protecting and enhancing EU-wide regulations. Britain has, for example, been “one of the leading voices for good, strong Common Fisheries Policy that would allow for sustainable fishing. So there will be arguments where [Britain’s] absence will make a difference.”

The argument that Brexit will be an opportunity for business to undermine government regulation has been articulated by environmentalists almost since the referendum. But James is able to provide clear and compelling evidence of how this will play out.

He cites the work around forcing the government to meet EU regulations on clean air, particularly in London where traffic pollution is harming people’s physical and mental health.

“UK citizens are now really clear that they want clean air, and do not want to die from air pollution. I think it would be hard to reduce legal requirements. But the wrong government might well try, and the wrong government might well succeed. And in doing that, would they try and take away a citizen’s right to enforce the law against a UK government? They might well try, and they could well succeed. These issues of how the law settles are completely open.

“The way that all laws are being taken over from European law into the corpus of law in the United Kingdom is that some of it becomes primary legislation. There will be an air quality law. But the key provisions of this air quality law that will determine whether a child is exposed to air pollution – what is the level of air pollution that is allowed – it looks like that will be coming over as secondary legislation.

“Secondary legislation is easily amended and Parliament gets little or no scrutiny. So the fear – and it is quite a correct fear – is that environmental legislation, labour legislation, could be brought over and the key operative parts that determine what the impact the legislation has on real human beings could be put into secondary legislation – and then some midnight Tuesday operation could go on where suddenly you find it’s all much more lax than you thought.

Shock doctrine

“Such a government could claim they have all the same laws, and they are meeting those same laws, but it just so happens that the level of requirements has gotten much lower. And that is enormous. It requires huge vigilance – and how will you interest the public in that when only geeks like us care? It has a big impact – more kids getting asthma, and those with asthma getting worse.”

He adds: “All these laws were built up over decades, and they took lots of work over decades and decades. So for them to all come over, and to have to potentially start over on all of them – in one country when the great efficiency of the EU is that they apply to every country – is an enormous ask.

“For a hypothetical government with bad intentions this is an enormous opportunity to make all of the standards worse. It’s rather like Shock Doctrine. If you have a government that is ill disposed to environmental regulations and protecting its citizens…you can see the results.”

Rough trade

The second major area of contention around Brexit is trade. The most vociferous advocates of leaving the EU argue that this will allow for free trade agreements with countries all around the world – increasing exports for British industry and creating jobs while also importing cheaper produce and reducing prices at the till.

Both these ‘benefits’ are predicated on EU produce being more expensive – because of the high environmental and labour regulation which has been introduced. The promise of free trade agreements has not come to pass – but do UK shoppers really want meat and other foods from deregulated producers?

“If we leave, under whatever arrangement, that allows us to have entirely separate trading arrangements the naïveté of current government actors will be exposed and we will find that out that it has not been easy to get even better trading relationships with the rest of the world, quite the opposite.

“We will then be extremely vulnerable to the United States forcing [its produce into the market] – the short hand is chlorinated chicken. The Agriculture Secretary in the United States has made it clear that ‘if you want a trade deal you will have to take all our farm produce the way it is’ – and it is a very different set of standards to the EU.”

He also confirmed that there was a “genuine threat” that the UK would have to accept imports of food and other goods that only confirm to the standards of the originating country, and not those of the UK. This is a trojan horse that will deliver chlorinated beef and hormone injected beef from the US, Australia and other trading partners to our supermarket shelves.

Black hole

“If we get what the people who love Brexit love to call sovereignty, the sovereignty to have our own trade deals – what they do not seem to understand is that trade deals are done on the basis of power entirely. It always comes down to power. ‘The rules are going to be set the way we want them because we are powerful’. That’s the way it is.

“Is the US more powerful than the UK in these terms? Well most countries are – certainly the big blocs are. The US is, the EU will be, China is, Russia is. You may be driven to take the lowest common denominator. It’s not what people say they want. But they may be forced into that position. It’s a genuine worry.”

Whether we leave or not, Brexit has already caused enormous damage. The momentum for environmental regulation – think of the Climate Change Act – which was built up by decades of hard work by campaigners across the UK has been lost. There has been almost no parliamentary debate, news coverage or national conversation about the environmental threats – large and small – that we must address. Extinction Rebellion taking over central London occupied a few days between years of Brexit debate.

“The other thing that is really upsetting about Brexit is it has been just a colossal black hole in everyone’s time and attention,” James said. “And it’s not going to stop. If May’s proposals to go through, there is another two full years of negotiations.

“As since the UK government has not said peep about what it actually wants, you will have the same arguments for another two years. It’s been three years. In that case, it will be the government in complete standstill for five years, not accomplishing anything at all…It’s a tremendous amount of more nonsense before you get to the end of the process, including renegotiating all these laws, on environment, labour, everything else.

“And this is the time when we have 12 more years to make a huge change if we are going to save civilisation. At the most crucial time in human history to save civilisation for future generations, Britain has decided to take itself off into a crazy, self regarding, destructive, downward spiral and focus on nothing meaningful.”

He added: “There were very negative players. Russia had a very big impact on Brexit. Russia – and Trump – had an interest in the EU collapsing, because the EU is a very progressive project. For both, Putin and Trump, the disintegration of the EU to whatever extent possible removes a beacon of hope from the whole world, and an alternative power bloc.”

Incumbents

The farce of Brexit is at its essence a conflict of beliefs about who is the perpetrator, who are the victims and who is the rescuer – to use the language of Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle.

The Brexiteers believe business is vital and benevolent – creating wealth and jobs – while the state is authoritarian, limiting, dangerous. Remainers seem to feel that the state is necessary, protective, benevolent – and that the big state of the EU is better placed than the UK government to hold back the tide of multinational corporate power. But for both, the citizenry is placed in the position of victim – needing business or government to meet its needs.

The story that James tells is, to me, far more compelling because it is the citizen that is given the role of hero – more in the school of Joseph Campbell – and it falls to us citizens to challenge power: and the malevolent force in this story is the ‘incumbents’ of corporate monopolies who inhibit innovation in the major industries. This is very much in keeping with Adam Smith’s attack on monopoly power in all its forms. The victims, here, are the small companies bringing renewable power to the market. But it falls to us to slay the dragons.

“The car companies are a good example of this. There was an announcement recently of an investigation by the EU into what appears to be – the EU thinks – collusion between car companies to prevent the introduction of pollution reduction systems. They created a cartel – in this case a complex monopoly – to prevent the introduction of pollution technology that they knew would save lives, and to delay it for as long as possible. Astounding.

“They did not start out with bad intentions. Diesel engines look like a good idea: they are efficient and they last a long time. And, by the way, they make a lot of money. So let’s ignore the bad news about them, and then we go a few more feet into badness by preventing pollution control because we will save quite a bit of money. We will be able to run it this way for five more years, because that will generate this much profit.”

Killing the dragons

“It does not start out with evil intentions, but you end up with this banality of evil accounting which turns their actions into the actions of monsters. They think they are making rational decisions – they are making rational decisions, but they are making immoral decisions, sometimes unlawful decisions.

“What do we do to shake them up? Back to this idea of the incumbents, so you have incumbents in the car industry, and in the energy industry. You have new companies that come in who can deliver clean transport, who can deliver clean energy. But the companies that are inventing that stuff, they are entrepreneurial, they are small, generally. They have the cool technology.

“But they do not have the wherewithal to fight the incumbents in court, they do not have the money. They do not have the expertise. The governments do not have any interest in doing this because the incumbents have so much influence.

So Germany looks like a green country, but as you begin to understand more deeply and as the Green party will tell you, ‘we are in some ways Green but we are also run by the car companies’, the influence of the car companies are so enormous that the country is beholden to them.

“So who is going to do it? The incumbents are sitting in the middle of the roadway, like dragons. And if you cannot move them, then the good solutions are not going to flow through. The markets for the first time can deliver this stuff, but the markets on their own are not going to because you have these dragons sitting in the middle of the roadway. So who is going to kill the dragons? Citizens have to do it. But then you need sharp weapons. And that is where litigation comes in.”

ClientEarth

James here explains the role of ClientEarth. It is not the hero, but instead a weapon in the arsenal of the citizenry in confronting its nemesis – polluters and vested interests. But just when we need this weapon most, as we are about the confront the final ordeal of climate breakdown, Brexit threatens to blunt this axe.

Brexit poses a direct threat to the work that ClientEarth does. This includes further uncertainty in relation to an application for EU funding to support environmental NGOs in China. James argues that the space for NGOs to work in China is now opening up, even as it closes down in European countries where right wing parties are coming into power. “This will be thrown into question by Brexit, with our HQ then being in a non-EU country.”

The charity currently has 90 lawyers practicing in courts across the EU, with 100 cases coming on in member state courts or the higher European courts. This work is “entirely unaffected”. But Brexit has sent shockwaves through its London offices.

James estimates that 40 percent of the UK-based staff are EU citizens, and there remains deep uncertainty about their status after Brexit. This means young families having to move countries, severing ties with family and community.

“Where will our employees be able to live? We do not know the honest answer. We have had to bring lawyers in, to advise them on their rights, so they can begin to understand where they might apply, and where there will be problems.”

Ecological civilisation

The potential breakdown in British environmental regulation during Brexit is placed in dramatic relief when James compares it to recent events in China. We take great pride in being an open, democratic, free market society which we compare favourably with the autocratic quasi-Communism in ‘the East’. The reality is more complex. James has spent the last five years working with high ranking Chinese officials to reform the law – giving insight which is incredibly rare.

China has instigated its transformation into an ‘ecological civilisation’. This promises to fundamentally change all aspects of Chinese national and civic life. “This is a deep, positive and powerful concept, which has given me a lot of hope,” James tells me. “They mean it. I have had conversations with a variety of senior people and ecological civilisation is a meaningful concept – it is not a slogan.”

He adds: “It’s quite clear that from the top on down in China they need no convincing, they understand the science, they completely get it, and they are trying to turn their whole country around as fast as possible on the environment – and they are very very clear about it. Here you have the Rupert Murdoch influenced media in the English language world sowing discord, and you have ExxonMobil and its peers sewing discord so that otherwise intelligent people are confused about these things.

“That does not happen in China. The politicians are also engineers – on the Politburo there are a lot of engineers – so if they see there is a problem, what an engineer says is, ‘how do we solve that most efficiently’. And it is a completely different mindset. They are saying, how do we solve this efficiently? That’s where we come in, we and other Western experts, or foreign experts are being brought in as advisers.

There are eight dimensions, including economics, regulations, agriculture, industrial policy – and the legal system. “They are throwing hundreds of their best intellectuals at this. This is very remote from anything that is going on anywhere in the world.”

Planning horizon

The leadership in China is well aware that its own power may not extend out of the major cities – with the popular saying ‘yes, but the Emperor is rivers and mountains away’. So they are leveraging change by rewiring the legal system and giving populations on the ground new legal enfranchisement.

James has been working with the higher echelons of Chinese society to fundamentally transform how the law operates. Here too, the citizen (or community) is cast as hero, not the lawyer, or the leader, or the corporation.

It feels almost uncomfortable to write anything positive about China when the human rights abuses are shocking, including its treatment of journalists. James is not naive about China. He understands concerns in the US and the UK about the development of this global power. He cites for example the fact that only China rivals the US in the development of artificial intelligence. He is also acutely aware of the issues around what we understand as human rights. “What China is up to in some regards – I can understand people being concerned about.”

Permits which allow companies to operate are now being drafted by lawyers so that companies can be sued for damaging the environment. For the first time Chinese citizens are now empowered and actively encouraged to sue companies – and local governments.

ClientEarth has been providing advice to the Supreme Court in China so NGOs can sue polluting companies. It has also been training prosecutors – and judges – to work on this novel environmental legislation. “We now every year have training for hundreds of Chinese judges, bringing global experts on legal decisions. This is fundamental. It is a highly intentional shift,” he argued.

“When you speak to senior officials, they say, ‘we are very clear that we have polluted air, soil, food that is already affecting the economy – we intend to still be here in 2,000 years with healthy people, healthy economy, healthy environment. We have a long planning horizon, and we need to be addressing these issues immediately. We think we also have to get the people involved – because the people are also very angry. We are trying to root out corruption in the system, if we allow NGOs and prosecution to be allowed in enforcement we will have a different regime’. I can only applaud this.

Mobilising citizens

“We have been working with them in a dedicated way now for seven years to build a regime of enforcing the law. It’s a fascinating inquiry. What do we need now so that every company in China knows that there are laws – because there are – saying there needs to be pollution control, and every company knows they are not allowed to ignore them, because in the past they were allowed to ignore them. This is a big shift. You get a different world.”

The threat of climate breakdown confronts each and every person on this planet, as does the collapse in biodiversity and the continued industrial pollution of both urban and rural landscapes. Every community, every nation, needs to respond in the same way.

James has been able to mobilise a positive and effective response to these threats, and has learned some important lessons along the way. The single most important for me is that it is you and I -citizens and communities – that can and will affect change. Corporations and governments will only act when we force them to. James has shown that this remains possible.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This story was first published on OpenDemocracy.