I met up with Polly Higgins about ten years ago. I couldn’t have guessed that one day a large pink boat named for her would be parked in my spare room. 

Today Polly is revered for her work as an international environment lawyer, memorialised by climate rebels as a forerunner and heroine for defining ecocide. She died tragically young in 2018.

Back then she was working for an alliance linking European, North African and Middle Eastern countries (EUMENA) that aimed to share an effective, cheap and zero carbon solar technology that harvests heat from the sun to create steam that generates industrial quantities of electricity. 

Mystery cancellations

Since then, that technology (Concentrating Solar Power or CSP) has proved itself well, producing gigawatts of clean power in every single continent and from China to Chile.

But the technology still encounters setbacks: a contract for cable linking production in Algeria with the German grid didn’t happen, apparently because of “geopolitics”. India’s leader Narendra Modi grandly announced that the sub-continent would lead an International Solar Alliance. This also came to nothing, with no explanation given.

There are plans now for Singapore to import this grid-scale solar power from Northern Australia. An under-sea cable project (“TUNUR”), is set to run from Tunisia to Italy. But will these meet the same fate?

CSP has met mysterious cancellations of plans since its inception in 1983, as well as withdrawal of promised investment, reluctance of governments to agree to trade this solar power, and outright sabotage as when the outstanding Spanish R&D centre was forbidden to spend EU grant funding.  

Duty of care

Polly may have already seen this coming when we first met: the problem is, and was, not lack of invention or technology but lack of the will to stand up to the fossil fuel lobby or to stop the plunder of the planet for corporate profit. 

She told me she was moving on and would instead be working to get the UN to outlaw Ecocide. 

Using existing international environmental and human rights law (such as the right to clean air or to a livelihood secure from avoidable disasters) she defined Ecocide as “Extensive damage to, destruction or loss of eco-systems of a given territory…” 

The adoption of Ecocide as a planetary law is still to happen, but it would impose a duty of care to lessen destructive events, and would establish actionable criminal culpability. 

Penalties could be levied­ against individuals, companies and states, and maybe also against  trade in commodities based on ecocidal degradation, such as beef products from the deforested Amazon or palm oil and soy-bean that are flattening rain forests.

Criminality in law

Such products would then be marked out as tainted by crime and denied market access. That could affect investors, make insurance more costly and lead to reputational damage and “stranded assets” if projects are declared unlawful and abandoned.

The taint of “criminality” may stop public bodies or pension funds being invested in fossil fuels if such use of funds breaks their rules.

In the context of the climate crisis, actions that are deliberate, reckless or negligent and cause serious, extensive or lasting ecological damage could undoubtedly add up to ecocide. 

Even without such criminal definition these acts can already undermine or undo efforts to meet zero carbon targets agreed by international treaty. This could in theory be actionable in civil law, but may need to prove financial loss. Making ecocide an international crime can change the balance of forces and is long overdue. 

As part of the Green New Deal motion moved by the Fire Brigades Union at Labour’s 2019 Conference, it resolved to “press for heavy UN penalties on ecocide damage to climate-sensitive habitats internationally”. As an exemplary move the next government could enact this as a crime within UK, which could assist divestment and anti-fracking campaigns here.

Crossing a line

How can it be enforced? Like tech advances, legal measures can’t solve the climate emergency on their own. Genocide has been illegal since 1945, but is still rampant and accelerating in tandem with ecocide.

But legal statute can give rise to and support targeted economic and political measures: South Africa’s apartheid regime incurred effective boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) that hit at trade, sports and status and eventually defeated apartheid.

If climate BDS was applied by FIFA, threatening to exclude Brazil from world football, could it perhaps start to counter the terrible destruction of the Amazon and the genocide of its people? 

It may not be easy to enforce, but making ecocide an internationally recognised criminal act is in itself a game-changer. It shifts the boundaries of acceptability and opens up new avenues to prevention. It is no longer a matter of contestable differences in policy, or national or commercial choices and targets, but an unarguable and clear crossing of a line that risks incurring sanctions and boycott.

This is not a substitute for campaigning. Rather, it would put a powerful weapon into the hands of campaigners fighting to save their own lands from climate crimes, or those calling on their pension funds or public bodies to divest. It would help to pressure governments to enforce UN sanctions.

Louder voice

While civil matters and decisions are diffused around huge organisations and may at best impact on a company’s share price, defining a criminal act can target individual CEOs and heads of companies personally. Even if intent is hard to prove, as with dangerous driving, criminal recklessness is also actionable.

While the International Criminal Court may be slow to move, at the UN General Assembly (which can initiate action and sanctions) the small island countries facing extinction have an equal vote with the US, China or Brazil, and maybe a much louder voice.

These issues and stories of community campaigns feature in this half-hour international conversation on Al Jazeera’s The Stream.

This Author

Rachel Lever has been a writer and activist on the left for some 60 years, starting with the Sharpeville massacre and anti-apartheid, through CND, the Vietnam war, the Troubles in Ireland, the miners’ strike, women’s liberation and the fight for democracy and women’s rights in the Labour Party and now the revival of Labour.

Carol Dyer climbed into her car and headed two hours north to see what was left of a home she had left in a panic exactly a year earlier.

“I want to see if the land has been cleared. If it has then I will see if I can dig out some sculptures my spouse made me. After that, I will leave my old house key behind some Ponderosa pines. I don’t plan to return so I guess it will be my last goodbye.” 

Carol is a 30-year-old artist and former care-giver living in Woodland. Up until 8 November 2018, she was a resident of Paradise, California, in the United States, a small town in the Sierra foothills devastated by an unprecedented fire that swept through it, leaving 85 people dead, 18,000 buildings erased and an entire community displaced. It was the deadliest and most destructive fire in the state’s history.

Burying the trauma

As we mark the first anniversary, the articles in the media seem to follow a pattern, sharing stories of the residents who have returned and the ways the town is emerging from the ashes. “Paradise regained: a resilient town rebuilds” says NBC news. ‘The air feels different: Paradise isn’t giving up,” says The Guardian.

The stories attest to a human desire to find meanings in tragedy and the determination of some its residents to rebuild. But these stories perhaps also seek to bury the trauma created by such a disaster – a trauma that we are reluctant to face when such disasters in a time of climate crisis may be “the new normal.”

Like many of the stories shared after the fire, Carol’s story of escape is a harrowing one. She had woken early that morning to a beautiful sunrise with no idea that at the same time a fire had ignited several miles to the northeast of her.

Carol was due to visit a care client that morning. As she drove into Paradise, she realized it was getting darker and darker and that ashes and embers were falling onto her car hood. “People were driving erratically and I ended up rear-ending another car. That’s when I called 911 and was told for the first time that there was a mandatory evacuation. Up until then I had received no texts, no messages, no warnings, nothing.”

She rushed home to grab a few personal things: “By the time I left, about 9am, I could barely see the sun, and by the time I hit the traffic on Pearson Road, it was pitch black with a glowing redness silhouetting the trees. I thought I am probably going to die and was very scared, but I tried to take deep breaths, thinking if this is it, being scared would not help.”

Safety and support

Carol made it out alive. But many didn’t, including one of her care clients, Evva Holt, who was 85. Evva succeeded in getting out of her assisted-living facility but died in the truck when it took the wrong turn and got swept up in the fire.

For those who did survive, it wasn’t just a case of starting again. Carol’s husband was studying and working in Davis, so she at least had a house to go to, but it wasn’t the same as home – even after she and her spouse moved from his small flat to a house in Woodland:  “The life I used to know is gone. I lost everything and it’s very hard to find a new starting point when you are starting from nothing. The fire destroyed my home but also my sense of safety and my support.”

Carol tells of how she loved her home in Paradise: “Where I lived, it was so nice. It was a quiet, peaceful, healthy place to be. It was dark at night, you could see stars. You could leave your doors unlocked and not worry about it.

“But it’s gone, the soil is completely contaminated, the black oak trees are all gone and many of the Ponderosa pines too. Most people have moved elsewhere.”

She still struggles to see Woodland as a long-term home. “People honestly are not even aware they have people from Paradise living in their town. Most Paradise residents ended up in Butte County, and most of the emotional support I get is from older friends in Sacramento and elsewhere.”

Climate refugees

As one way to respond to the trauma and make sense of her experience, Carol initially threw herself into campaigning for climate action.  She had been concerned about climate change before, but she felt speaking out was something concrete she could do to make a difference.

Fewer than three months after moving to Davis, she joined 70 others demanding Congressman Garamendi recognise the climate emergency and spoke at a number of subsequent events, contributing to Garamendi’s eventual decision to come out in support of the Green New Deal.

Carol explained: “I think there is a huge level of denial here in California at the level of  extreme natural disasters we are witnessing. I was aware of it before the fire. In Paradise, we were getting much less rain – I hadn’t even seen snow in the town for several years, which had always been the case before. It’s not normal to see all these fires or to be so dry so late in the year as we are experiencing again this year.”

Indeed, some commentators have called the 27,000 Paradise displaced residents, California’s first “climate refugees.” 

Carol says at first she balked at the term: “I didn’t see myself as a refugee, as California is my home. I felt that applied to people outside California, like those in Honduras or Guatemala who have had to leave their home due to habitat destruction or droughts. But the reality is I lost a home and do feel like a nomad, so now I think the term makes more sense.”

Carol is also angry at the inaction of PG&E, which California’s fire authorities in May officially determined as responsible for the fires due to faults in its transmission lines: “They purposely decided to prioritise their shareholders and executives rather than investing properly in infrastructure. We need to take them over and not force taxpayers to pay for their mistakes.”

Rebuilding home

Carol has had to be careful, though, in how much she campaigns: “I try to be helpful and supportive as much as you can if I can be a voice, but being very active can be a little too stressful for me.”

As an artist, Carol also uses her creative skills with drawing or bead work to process her experience. She speaks about a recent painting of a polar bear, a classic climate change meme, but one now invested with a double meaning as she has used it to reflect on the bear’s loss of home in the Arctic while Carol  processes her own loss.

Carol’s experience a year on from the Paradise fires speaks to the challenges of rebuilding and recovering in a time of climate change. It also attests to the profound difference between house and home.

Rebuilding a house is hard enough – especially if you aren’t wealthy or aren’t insured – but it is far more challenging to rebuild a sense of home, given how homes are tied to memories, to a community, to a time and place.

When those threads are torn apart through a profoundly traumatic experience like the Camp Fire, it requires a long process of weaving to recreate home. Even more so in a society that has long prioritized individualism and personal success over community and solidarity.

Carol admits that as much as she tries to live in a positive spirit, she finds it hard now “to be attached to anything, to connect to where I live or to attach to the community I am part of because it could all be gone tomorrow.”

She says she thinks “home is still somewhere in the mountains,” but doesn’t yet know where.

This Author

Nick Buxton is an author, researcher and former communications coordinator of the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth that the Bolivian government hosted in 2010. He is the executive director of Movement Rights and tweets @nickbuxton.

This article was first published in the Davis Vanguard. 

Rapid and widespread changes are needed across the world’s energy systems to tackle climate change and ensure sustainable development, experts have said.

In its annual World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that in a scenario based on countries’ stated intentions, targets and existing measures, the rises in greenhouse gases slow but do not peak before 2040.

It would leave hundreds of millions of people still without access to electricity, early deaths due to pollution would remain at today’s raised levels, and carbon emissions would lock in severe impacts of climate change, the IEA warned.

Sharp

It would also see high output of shale gas and oil in the US, which has launched the process of pulling out of the global Paris Agreement to cut emissions to prevent temperature rises of more than 1.5C or 2C.

There would also be an increase in solar power, a flattening of oil demand and reduction in coal use, alongside countries driving change with plans to reach net zero emissions.

But the momentum behind clean energy would not be enough to offset the effects of an expanding global economy and growing population.

A scenario which delivers sharp emissions cuts and meets the goals of curbing rising temperatures would need rapid and widespread changes across all parts of the energy system, the IEA report said.

Global

A key part of this is delivering energy efficiency improvements, from retrofitting existing buildings to save energy on heating and lighting to more efficient design and recycling of materials such as aluminium, steel and plastic.

Under this sustainable development scenario, electricity would overtake oil by 2040 as the leading source of energy, as electric vehicles take off, and most of the increase would come from wind and solar power.

And with so much recently-built coal power on the system globally, plants will need to be fitted with technology to capture and store carbon emissions or to burn biomass, re-purpose them to provide backup to other sources or retire them early.

Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said: “What comes through with crystal clarity in this year’s World Energy Outlook is there is no single or simple solution to transforming global energy systems.

Massive

“Many technologies and fuels have a part to play across all sectors of the economy. For this to happen, we need strong leadership from policy makers, as governments hold the clearest responsibility to act and have the greatest scope to shape the future.”

And he urged: “The world urgently needs to put a laser-like focus on bringing down global emissions.

“This calls for a grand coalition encompassing governments, investors, companies and everyone else who is committed to tackling climate change.

“Our Sustainable Development Scenario is tailor-made to help guide the members of such a coalition in their efforts to address the massive climate challenge that faces us all.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Antidepressants are making their way into freshwater ecosystems and changing the way fish behave while hunting for food, according to biologists.

Researchers have found that fluoxetine, the main ingredient in Prozac, can disrupt the foraging behaviour of mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki), a species of freshwater fish found in the US and Australia.

Like most small freshwater fish, mosquitofish tend to hunt in social groups – shoals – to forage more efficiently and reduce the risk of predation.

Pollutants

In their study, published in the journal Biology Letters, the researchers found that fluoxetine had no apparent impact on solitary fish.

But in the case of mosquitofish shoals, exposure to high doses of the drug affected their overall food consumption and altered their foraging behaviour.

The team said its findings suggest that “social context may be an important, but underappreciated, factor influencing the ecological impacts of chemical pollutants on wildlife”.

Fluoxetine, along with many other drugs, is often passed through urine and makes its way into freshwater bodies such as lakes and rivers because water treatment systems cannot filter it out.

These psychoactive pollutants have been shown to influence behaviour in animals – with a recent study by King’s College London reporting that cocaine contamination in the River Thames was making eels hyperactive.

Confounded

Previous studies have shown how antidepressants affect individual animals but few have questioned whether “the impacts seen in social isolation are reflective of those in a social context”, the researchers said.

To find out whether fluoxetine affected group dynamics, the team from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, exposed 206 fish in the lab to fluoxetine levels found in freshwater bodies.

The low-fluoxetine group was given 30 nanograms per litre (ng/L) of the drug while the high-dose group was exposed to 300ng/L of fluoxetine.

The team said it only used female mosquitofish in the experiments to “control for any effects of sexual behaviour that may have confounded the results”.

Risk

This is because previous research by the team has shown that when exposed to fluoxetine, male fish end up spending much more time pursuing female fish for sex than they would normally.

After being exposed to fluoxetine for 28 days, the behaviour of the solitary fish remained unchanged by the drug.

However, the groups of fish that were exposed to high levels of fluoxetine were less aggressive and consumed less prey compared with shoals exposed to none, or low levels, of the drug.

The researchers wrote in their paper: “Our results suggest that behavioural tests in social isolation may not accurately predict the environmental risk of chemical pollutants for group-living species and highlight the potential for social context to mediate the effects of psychoactive pollutants in exposed wildlife.”

This Author

Nilima Marshall is a PA science reporter.

Most of the world’s largest forestry companies producing paper or wooden furniture are failing to protect their workers from forced labour, according to new research.

Just three of the 39 largest forestry companies can show how they check for forced labour risks in their supply chains, KnowTheChain revealed today. 

The forestry sector employs thirteen million workers globally with another 41 million employed in informal forestry. They carry out logging, produce pulp or timber or make paper or wooden furniture But exploitation in the forestry sector is endemic, with up to 50 percent of the world’s $30-100 billion illegal logging operations based on forced labour.

Exploitation

Forestry workers in sawmills face threats, violence, poor living and working conditions, non-payment of wages, and excessive or unpaid overtime, and having their freedom of movement restricted, with risks even higher for the sector’s large migrant workforce.

Yet today’s study finds that just 8 percent of the sector’s largest companies ban their suppliers from charging workers recruitment fees, which can lead migrant workers into debt bondage.

None of the 39 companies disclosed engaging with supply chain workers’ groups such as trade unions – a key safeguard against exploitation.

The briefing argues that forestry companies and investors must understand these risks and carry out human rights checks (due diligence) to avoid risk and help prevent the exploitation of workers. 

Systemic problem 

Felicitas Weber, KnowTheChain project lead, said: “The world’s forestry sector has a systemic problem of forced labour, and right now companies show a lack of action to address this appalling abuse.

“Responsible investors have a role to play in ensuring the people carrying out logging or producing pulp, paper or wooden furniture are safe from forced labour and exploitation.”

She added: “This guidance provides forestry investors with the tools they need to drive meaningful change in this sector, avoid risk, and protect workers from forced labour and abuse.”

This Article 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. 

Red grouse (Lagopus lagopus) are wild birds that live in heather moorlands of the UK and Ireland. 

In order to keep red grouse numbers as high as possible, gamekeepers routinely kill predators, such as foxes and stoats, undertake large-scale mountain hare culls and, on some estates, illegally persecute birds of prey, such as hen harriers and golden eagles.

A fifth of upland Scotland is used for driven grouse shooting, with the land being managed to maximise the number of red grouse available for shooting. 

Mountain hares

It is time for the Scottish Government to reform the intensive management of Scotland’s grouse moors and put an end to the indiscriminate killing of our wildlife.

More than 26,000 mountain hares are killed each year on Scotland’s grouse moors, according to Scottish Government figures.

The mountain hare is Britain’s only native hare and its conservation status was recently downgraded to ‘unfavourable’ as a result of new data supplied by the UK to the EU, primarily because of hunting and game management. This means that special conservation action needs to now be taken to stop further declines and aid population recovery.

Yet, gamekeepers routinely carry out mountain hare culls as they fear that the hares spread disease via ticks to red grouse, thereby reducing the number of red grouse available for commercial shooting. This management has persisted despite the fact that scientists at one of Scotland’s independent research institutes concluded that there was ‘no compelling evidence base to suggest culling mountain hares might increase red grouse densities’. 

Hares are notoriously challenging to shoot as they are small, fast-moving animals that are able to take cover easily. This means that the risk of causing injury rather than a clean kill is heightened, and hares can suffer greatly as a result. There is also no requirement for cull returns during the open season, or for welfare monitoring of these culls, so the scale of suffering is unknown.

OneKind has been campaigning to secure greater protection for mountain hares for the past three years, with a petition currently before the Scottish Parliament Public Petitions Committee as well as an open letter to the Scottish Government that has now attracted almost 22,000 signatures.  Both call for an end to the slaughter of these iconic creatures.

Protected birds

There is a clear and well-documented association between driven grouse moors and the illegal persecution of protected birds of prey. 

Methods of killing these protected birds include shooting, live-trapping, illegal poisoning and nest destruction. Each year RSPB reports incidents on driven grouse moors in its Birdcrime report. 

In order to help conservation planning of golden eagles, in 2017 a number of these protected birds were satellite-tagged. Of the thirteen that later went missing, eleven occurred on land managed for grouse moors. 

In May of this year, a young male hen harrier was also found in an illegal spring trap sat next to its nest on a grouse moor. The hen harrier did not survive, and a senior vet confirmed it was clear that he had suffered greatly.

Another trap was found in its nest, beside abandoned eggs, and with no sign of the female hen harrier. Naturalist, Chris Packham, met with experts, including OneKind Director Bob Elliot, to unravel the horrific storyon camera. 

It is no coincidence that the majority of those convicted of raptor persecution crimes are gamekeepers.

Legal traps

Traps and snares can be, legally, set on grouse moors to target the red grouse’s natural predators: foxes, weasels, stoats and other birds. However, these traps are indiscriminate, and cause suffering to non-target species too, such as protected badgers and even companion dogs and cats.

There is no limit to the number of animals that gamekeepers can legally kill, and many of the target species are not protected by closed seasons.

Bird Traps

In addition to the estimated 700,000 red grouse shot each year in the UK, hundreds of thousands of other birds are also killed each year on driven grouse moors.

Birds are captured in legal live-catch corvid traps, traps which are also indiscriminate as to the species of bird caught: victims can spend hours under stress in this confined space before the gamekeeper arrives to shoot or beat them to death. 

Foxes are targeted with cruel, outdated snare traps: an anchored noose that is positioned to capture an animal by its neck, leg or abdomen.  They can cause severe physical and mental suffering for captured animals and although they are only meant to ‘restrain’ the animal, their struggle to set themselves free causes the wire to tighten, often leading to severe injury or strangulation. 

To lure foxes into snares, gamekeepers often lay snares around a ‘stink pit’: a place where the gamekeepers dump rotting animal carcasses. The smell of decomposing animals lures the foxes towards the dead animals, where they are then caught in the snares surrounding the pit. During our work in the field we have discovered foxes, deer, geese and fish in stink pits. 

Although stink pits are targeted towards foxes, they can also attract badgers, otters, pine martens and domestic cats and dogs.  

The future

We believe that it’s time to end the indiscriminate killing of wildlife on grouse moors and elsewhere and that’s why we recently launched a petition with the Scottish Parliament to conduct a full review on the use of traps and snares and their impact on animal welfare. You can keep up to date with our campaign here.

OneKind is also part of a coalition of like-minded organisations that have come together to work towards radical reform for Scotland’s grouse moors.

The Revive Coalition has the backing of naturalist, Chris Packham, and recently hosted a collaborative conference with members of the public.  You can sign the Revive pledge to revive Scotland’s moors here.

This Author 

Eve Massie is campaigner and press officer for Scotland’s leading animal campaigns charity, OneKind.

National Galleries Scotland has announced that it is ending its partnership with the oil company BP in response to the climate emergency.

In a statement posted on its website the gallery said: “The BP Portrait Award 2019 exhibition opens on 7 December at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. At the National Galleries of Scotland we recognise that we have a responsibility to do all we can to address the climate emergency. For many people, the association of this competition with BP is seen as being at odds with that aim.

“Therefore, after due consideration, the trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland have decided that this will be the last time that the galleries will host this exhibition in its present form.”

Destructive activities 

Campaigners in Edinburgh have targeted the award on its previous annual visits to the Scottish Portrait Gallery. The creative action group BP or not BP? Scotland have performed several times inside the gallery, including with oily portraits and climate-themed Christmas carolling.

The BP Portrait Award has been targeted by campaigners for many years, who believe that the prestigious portrait prize is being used by the oil giant to ‘artwash’ its image and distract from its real destructive activities.

One of the judges of this year’s prize, Gary Hume, spoke out against the BP branding when this year’s award was announced, and was joined in his criticism by 77 other artists including five Turner Prize winners.

At the VIP launch of the BP Portrait Award at the London National Portrait Gallery in June, activist theatre group BP or not BP? blocked the entrances to the gallery with portraits of frontline environmental defenders, forcing guests to climb over a wall to get into the event.

On the final day of the London exhibition, activists from Extinction Rebellion poured fake oil over semi-naked performers inside the gallery in protest at the BP sponsorship.

Massive win

Alys Mumford, from BP or not BP? Scotland said: “It is extremely significant that yet another major Scottish cultural institution has dropped fossil fuel sponsorship, following the Edinburgh International Festival in 2015 and the Edinburgh Science Festival earlier this year.

“This is a massive win for campaigners who have taken action against the BP Portrait Award being hosted in Scotland for several years.

“It sends a clear message that it is no longer socially acceptable to have links with the fossil fuel industry because of their continued role in driving the climate crisis and human rights abuses across the world.

“We hope that the few remaining institutions that allow themselves to be used as greenwash for the industry join the National Galleries on the right side of history’

According to Roxana Halls, an artist who has exhibited in the BP Portrait Award 5 times and who was one of the artists who joined Gary Hume in calling for an end to the BP branding: “This is a brave and difficult decision on the part of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, one which cannot have been easy to take and which I applaud.”

Seismic

According to Chris Garrard of Culture Unstained, a research and campaign group who have been working with artists to challenge BP sponsorship at the Portrait Galleries.

“This is nothing short of seismic” Chris said. “Following in the footsteps of the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre, the trustees have recognised that, in a time of climate emergency, an ethical red line must be drawn and BP is on the wrong side of it.

“Now the National Portrait Gallery must follow this lead, cut its ties with BP and reinvent the Portrait Award as a positive celebration of portraiture, not a promotional tool for a climate criminal.’

This news comes just a month after the Royal Shakespeare Company publicly announced the end of its long-running sponsorship deal with BP. According to the RSC’s Artistic Director Gregory Doran and Executive Director Catherine Mallyon,

“Amidst the climate emergency, which we recognise, young people are now saying clearly to us that the BP sponsorship is putting a barrier between them and their wish to engage with the RSC. We cannot ignore that message.”

Two days after the RSC statement, the National Theatre in London announced that its corporate partnership with Shell would not be renewed when it comes to an end in June 2020.

Trojan Horse

The ending of these three sponsorship deals in the space of five weeks increases the pressure on the shrinking number of UK arts institutions (including the London National Portrait Gallery, British Museum, Royal Opera House, Science Museum and Southbank Centre) that still have promotional deals with fossil fuel companies.

Attention is turning in particular to the British Museum, where a BP-sponsored Troy exhibition is due to open on 21 November. 

Activist theatre group BP or not BP? have announced plans for a “mass creative takeover” of the British Museum on February 8th 2020.

In a cheeky twist, the group has successfully crowdfunded to build a Trojan Horse to bring to the event, which they believe will be the largest protest the museum has ever seen.

This Author 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from BP or not BP.

Image: BP or not BP.

We need to talk about geoengineering. Badly. To do so, I suggest two ground rules.

First, when we imagine futures with geoengineering, whether utopian or dystopian, let’s talk about the path from the present to those futures.

Second, if society is to protect itself from dangerous global warming, it will most likely combine a whole range of different methods; there is no silver bullet. So we need to discuss geoengineering together with other actions and technologies, not in isolation.

False premise

In After Geoengineering, Holly Buck urges social movements and climate justice militants to engage with geoengineering, rather than rejecting it. She questions campaigners’ focus on mitigation, i.e. on measures such as energy conservation and renewable electricity generation that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Buck offers a clear, jargon-free review of technologies, from afforestation and biochar that some climate campaigners embrace, to solar radiation management, the last word in technofixes that is broadly reviled. She intersperses her narrative with fictional passages, warning of the pitfalls of “mathematical pathways or scenarios, behind which are traditions of men gaming our possible futures”.

But one of Buck’s key arguments – that we will reach a point where society will collectively “lose hope in the capacity of current emissions-reduction measures to avert climate upheaval”, and “decide that something else must be tried” – cuts right across both my ground rules.

Buck asks: are we at the point […] where “the counterfactual scenario is extreme climate suffering” and therefore “it is worth talking about more radical or extreme measures [than mitigation]”, such as geoengineering? “Deciding where the shift – the moment of reckoning, the desperation point – lies is a difficult task”.

This is a false premise, in my view, for three reasons.

Implied community 

First: we cannot, and will not for the foreseeable future, perceive this “desperation point” as a moment in time. For island nations whose territory is being submerged, for indigenous peoples in the wildfire-ravaged Amazon, for victims of hurricanes and crop failures, the point of “extreme climate suffering” has already passed. 

For millions in south Asian nations facing severe flooding, it is hovering very close. For others living on higher ground, particularly in the global north, it may not arrive for years, perhaps even decades. 

If we take action, it will hopefully never arrive in its more extreme forms. This slow-burning quality of climate crisis is one of the things that makes it hard to deal with.

Second: at no point in the near future will “we” easily be able to take decisions on geoengineering – particularly the large-scale techniques – collectively. Political fights over geoengineering are pitting those with power and wealth against the common interest, and it’s hard to see how it could be otherwise.

Buck writes: “There will be a moment where ‘we’, in some kind of implied community, decide that something else [other than mitigation] must be tried” (p. 2). But she doesn’t probe who this “we” is, or spell out the implications of the fact that, in the class society in which we live, power is appropriated from the “implied community” by the state, acting in capital’s interests.

We can only decide, to the extent that we challenge their power. We can not free technologies from that context without freeing ourselves from it.

Alternative visions

Third: the political fights actually unfolding are not about “geoengineering vs extreme climate suffering”, but about “geoengineering vs measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions”.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is lauded by the fossil fuel industry as an alternative to cutting fossil fuel use; Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenarios in order to cover up governments’ failure to reduce emissions; research funds that go to technofixes such as ocean fertilisation and solar radiation management (SRM), that sit easily with centralised state action, do not go to decentralised technologies that have democratic potential.

Buck believes that, despite these current clashes, we can uncover ways of using geoengineering for the common good. For example, she writes of expensive and unproven techniques for direct removal of carbon from the atmosphere: “We have to move from reflexive opposition of new technologies toward shaping them in line with our demands and alternative visions”.

Shape technologies in line with our visions of a socially just society? Yes, certainly. Start with direct carbon removal or CCS? Absolutely not.

We should focus, first, on technologies that produce non-fossil energy, and those that cut fossil fuel use in first-world economies and the energy-intensive material suppliers in the global south that feed them. We need also to understand technologies of adaptation to a warmed-up world (e.g. flood defences and how they can work for everyone, and not just the rich).

Carbon capture

As for technologies that suck carbon from the atmosphere, if they can be used in the common interest at all, it should be a matter of principle that “soft” local technologies (e.g. afforestation and biochar) be researched and discussed in preference to big interventionist technologies like SRM.

I will expand these arguments with reference to three themes: (1) the current treatment of geoengineering techniques by governments and companies; (2) whether, and why, we should start with “soft” and local technologies, as opposed to big ones; and (3) how we might compare geoengineering with mitigation technologies.

The dangers inherent in Buck’s approach are nowhere clearer than with CCS. This technique extracts carbon dioxide from wherever it is emitted, e.g. power stations’ smokestacks, with “scrubbers” (often using adsorbent chemicals). The CO2 is then trapped, liquefied and transported to a site nearby to be stored.

CCS was developed by oil companies more than 40 years ago in the USA, as a technique for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), i.e. squeezing extra barrels of oil out of a depleting reservoir. The captured carbon is pumped into oil reservoirs to increase the pressure, and increase the volume of oil that could be pumped to the surface.

More recently, CCS has been used to trap carbon dioxide emissions at power stations and other industrial sites. But it is so complex, and so expensive, that its supporters say it can not yet be applied at large scale. It has never lived up to decades of talk about its potential.

Redistributive ends

Buck, displaying a super-optimism that strains credibility, writes: “Perhaps industry’s failure to make use of this technology could even be an opportunity to redirect it for more progressive ends” (p. 124).

Linking it with biofuel production is “an opportunity to appropriate this group of techniques for redistributive ends” – which would require “an appetite for paying for and living with expensive infrastructure – and for making bright, clear distinctions regarding how and why it is built”.

Who will steer the introduction of geoengineering techniques? Buck argues that: “If there’s no progressive vision about how to use CCS, […] the oil companies can essentially take us hostage” (p. 203)

To advance an alternative vision to the companies’ would require a price on carbon, she argues (p. 204); a discussion about nationalising oil companies (p. 206); and a movement to demand carbon removal from the state, linking it to an end to subsidies for fossil fuels (p. 207).

This logic is back-to-front. CCS, unlike renewable electricity generation and a string of proven mitigation technologies, will require years of development before it can work at large scale and in a manner that makes any economic sense.

Moreover, CCS’s function is to remove carbon dioxide already produced by economic activity.

So in every situation, the first question to ask about it is: is there not a way to avoid emitting the carbon dioxide in the first place?

Investment

Let’s imagine an optimistic scenario, in which, in a western oil producing country, e.g. the USA or UK, a social democratic or left-leaning government, committed to serious action on climate change, is elected. The oil companies find themselves fighting a desperate battle to protect their practices and profits; a progressive, working-class movement seeks to control and contain them.

That movement will surely put stopping fossil fuel subsidies at the top of its list of demands. Some sections of it might demand carbon taxes (and some oil companies are already reconciled to these). At best, some of the oil companies will be nationalised.

But then we will surely face struggle over what to do with the funds freed up by an end to subsidies, and what to do with companies over which the state has taken control. Should funds be invested in CCS development? Or in proven technologies that can slash fossil fuel demand? Should oil companies be directed to use their engineering capacity to develop CCS? Or to use it to complete the decarbonisation of electricity generation and start working on other economic sectors?

If there is a situation where CCS research would be preferred, I cannot imagine it. And Buck didn’t spell one out in her book.

One difficulty I had with Buck’s argument is that in a crucial section on CCS (pp. 133-137), she discusses it together with direct capture of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, a different technique (also currently too expensive to be operable at any scale). Her interest in the latter relates to a possible future need to draw carbon dioxide down from the atmosphere more rapidly than can be done with other “softer” technologies (biochar, afforestation, etc).

This is something we might have to worry about in many years’ time, and I don’t want to speculate about it now.

Bioenergy

But Buck sees both technologies as a way of reforming oil companies, in the course of implementing a Green New Deal in the USA, i.e. as a current political issue. Direct air capture could “breach the psychic chain between CCS and fossil fuels”, she suggests (p. 127).

Now? Or in many years’ time? After our movement has grown strong enough to stop fossil fuel subsidies, or even to nationalise oil companies? Or before? Timing and sequencing matter.

Given that CCS and direct air capture are both monstrously expensive and many never work at scale, and given the emergency nature of climate action, proven mitigation and renewable electricity generation technologies should be our priority. That’s the quickest way of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. If that doesn’t fit with oil companies as presently constituted, tough on them.

The other potential use of CCS that Buck discusses is in conjunction with bioenergy (BECCS). CCS with fossil-fueled processes only saves the carbon those processes have produced, and is at best carbon-neutral. BECCS is seen as potentially carbon-negative, i.e. it could leave the atmosphere with less carbon than it started with. Plants naturally capture carbon as they grow; if they are used for fuel, with CCS, that carbon is also captured and stored.

BECCS is unproven to work at scale, in part because it would need massive amounts of land to grow the crops, presenting a potential threat to hundreds of millions of people who live by farming.

Widespread concern 

The principal practical use of BECCS so far has been by the IPCC: by including wildly exaggerated estimates of BECCS use, they have made their scenarios for avoiding dangerous climate change add up, without too rapid a transition away from fossil fuels.

This use – or rather, misuse – of BECCS has provoked outrage from climate scientists since the IPCC’s fifth assessment report was published in 2014. (See e.g. here.)

One team of climate scientists who double-checked the calculations, led by Sabine Fuss at the Mercator Research Institute in Berlin, concluded that the IPCC projections of BECCS’s potential was probably between twice and four times what is physically possible.

The best estimates Fuss and her colleagues could make for the sustainable global potential of negative emission technologies were: 0.5-3.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide removal per year (GtCO2/yr) for afforestation and reforestation, 0.5-5 GtCO2/yr for BECCS, 0.5-2 GtCO2/yr for biochar, 2-4 GtCO2/yr for enhanced weathering, 0.5-5 GtCO2/yr for direct air capture of carbon and 0-5 GtCO2/yr for soil carbon squestration.

Fuss and her colleagues wrote that they share “the widespread concern that reaching annual deployment scales of 10-20 GtCO2/yr via BECCS at the end of the 21st century, as is the case in many [IPCC] scenarios, is not possible without severe adverse side effects.”

And that’s putting it in polite, scholarly language.

Public rift

Buck does not discuss this dispute, perhaps the sharpest public rift between the IPCC and the climate scientists on whose work it relies. She only comments in passing that, to answer why the concept of BECCS has any life in it, “possible answers include” that “modelers needed a fix for the models, and BECCS seemed the most plausible” (p. 64). That’s wildly understated.

Further on, Buck speculates that “deployment [of BECCS] at climate-significant scales would be a massive feat of social engineering”, which would imply “a different politics” under which people who live on and work the land and own the resources for production (pp. 68-69).

Again, this argument is back-to-front. 

I embrace the idea of speculating about a post-capitalist future in which industrial agriculture, along with other monstrosities, has been overcome. And I would not exclude the idea that BECCS in some form might be part of it. 

But long before we get to that stage, there is the current battle to be fought: we need to join with the many honest climate scientists who have denounced the fraudulent use of BECCS in the IPCC’s scenarios; to expose its use as a cover for pro-fossil-fuel government policies; and address the climate policy priorities those governments seek to avoid. Now, BECCS is not one of these.

“Hard” and “soft”

The geoengineering technologies discussed by Buck range from those that are by their nature local, small-scale and “soft”, to the largest, “hardest” technologies such as SRM. 

At the furthest “soft” end is biochar, a process by which biomass (crop residues, grass, and so on) is combusted at low temperatures (pyrolysis) to make charcoal, which can be mixed into soils or buried, to store the carbon. Afforestation is also on the “soft” end of the scale, as are some ocean farming techniques. 

Buck also points to some significant local, if not “soft”, techniques, such as engineering specific glaciers to prevent them from melting (pp. 247-248).

Buck is sceptical of some claims made for the potential of afforestation, and I am too. But her appeals to social movements to engage, instead, with big and “hard” technologies left me unconvinced.

“The shortcomings of large infrastructure projects have generated suspicion about megaprojects, suspicion which may be transferred to solar geoengineering” (p. 45), she writes. Quite rightly so, I say.

Degrowth

Degrowth advocates, Buck complains, believe that “technologically complex systems beget technocratic elites: fossil fuels and nuclear power are dangerous because sophisticated technological systems managed by bureaucrats will gradually become less democratic and egalitarian” (p. 160). 

The belief that big technological systems “result in a society divided into experts and users […] limits the engagement of degrowth thinking with many forms of carbon removal, which is unfortunate” (p. 161).

What about the substantial issue? Don’t sophisticated technological systems managed by bureaucrats really become less democratic and egalitarian? Aren’t the degrowth advocates right about that? Hasn’t nuclear power, for example, shown us that?

Arguments similar to Buck’s about geoengineering techniques – that, if they were controlled differently, could be of collective benefit, and so on – have long been made about nuclear power, the second largest source of near-zero-carbon electricity after hydro power.

But experience shows that nuclear’s scale has made it intrinsically anti-collective: in our hierarchical society, it has only been, and could only have been, developed by the state and large corporations. From where I am standing, SRM and CCS look much the same.

Technology and capitalism

Take another technology that is in a sense both big and small: the internet. Its pioneers saw its huge democratic potential as a tool of communication, but as it has grown, under corporate and state control, it has become an instrument of state surveillance, corporate control and mind-bending marketing techniques.

For Buck, the internet of the early 2000s was “new and transformative, before we knew it would give us so many cat videos and listicles and trolls”. She appeals to critics of geoengineering, who “tend to locate the psychological roots of climate engineering in postwar, big science techno-optimism”, to think of it instead as “a phenomenon born of the early 2000s, a more globalist moment” (p. 44).

I do not recognise, in the early 2000s, this moment of hope for the internet or for “globalism”. The terrorist attack on the USA on 11 September 2001 marked the end of a desperate game of catch-up, played by US regulatory agencies against the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: it prompted demands by the security agencies that the state’s focus shift from stopping the tech giants hoovering up information, to insisting they share that information with the state.

All restraints on the invasion of personal privacy were removed. In China, the state is now combining the same technologies with facial recognition software to take control over citizens to a new level. (Shoshana Zuboff writes about this in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.)

A range of socialist writers from Andre Gorz onwards have theorised the way that technology is shaped by capitalism and cannot be seen as inherently progressive. A new generation of technological determinists such as Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, and Leigh Phillips, have offered a challenge to this tradition (which has left me completely unconvinced).

A serious discussion of geoengineering will necessarily be contextualised by consideration of these underlying issues about technology.

Regeneration

To my mind, socialist and collectivist politics can embrace “soft” and small technologies more easily than large ones, because they can more easily be used independently of structures of power and wealth. 

In many cases, e.g. electricity networks, we may well find ourselves advocating a combination of big and small technologies. But if we envisage socialism as a process that resists and eventually supercedes the state and big corporations, then in principle those technologies that can only be mobilised by the state and big corporations, such as nuclear power – and the big “hard” forms of geoengineering – present greater problems to us.

Buck argues that “a world patterned around carbon removal would be similar to one that’s committed itself to deep decarbonisation and extreme mitigation”, but had gone one step further.

 On the other hand, she writes that “regeneration, removal, restoration and so forth [her descriptive categories for a range of geoengineering techniques] bring a different narrative than mitigation, and perhaps a different politics”. It might be easier to “build a broader coalition around regeneration”, although, or perhaps because, “the goal is more drastic” (p 192).

To point to geoengineering advocacy as an alternative, preferable to mitigation (i.e. reduction of carbon emissions), carries a great danger of playing into the hands of corporate and government opponents of action.

Craven greenwash

Who, in the here and now, will comprise this “broader coalition” to consider geoengineering? According to Noah Deich of Carbon 180, who is quoted by Buck (p. 246): [T]here’s the global Paris Agreement community [?], as well as energy, mining and agriculture, all of whom need to embrace carbon removal, ‘not as a scary transformation for their business, but really the natural evolution for where they need to go to increase prosperity. To serve their customers, employees, shareholders, all of these key stakeholders better. It needs to come from the top down.’

This version of geoengineering advocacy, which seeks to combine it with satisfying corporate needs to “serve stakeholders better”, scares me stiff. How can it be anything but craven greenwash?

Buck is not herself advocating such alliances. But she clearly sides with big and “hard” technologies against small, “soft” ones.

She derides supporters of regenerative agriculture for their “determined post-truth faith in soils”, which, she fears, “could contribute to a failure to invest in other technologies that are also needed for this gargantuan carbon removal challenge” (p. 116).

Why send more funds the way of big technologies? Already, “eco-system based approaches”, including afforestation and regenerative agriculture, only get 2.5 percent of global climate finance, Buck has reported a few pages earlier (p. 96).

Dramatic transformation 

“Soft” afforestation and biochar, or “hard” CCS and SRM? Buck cites a research group headed by Detlef van Vuuren of Utrecht university in the Netherlands, who proposed that the 1.5 degrees C target could be met with minimal amounts of BECCS and other types of carbon dioxide removal. (Reported here; full article (restricted access) here.) 

They propose a larger programme of afforestation, and more rapid expansion of renewables-generated electricity, than in the IPCC scenarios. Van Vuuren and his colleagues also factor in lifestyle changes, including an overhaul of food processing towards lab-grown meat.

Buck is sceptical about the prospect of this “dramatic transformation”, as opposed to a focus on carbon removal – although she concludes that it should be “a vibrant matter of debate” (p. 109). And I agree with her there. 

But still more important is a related debate that is absent from her book: the potential of energy conservation, rather than carbon removal, in the fight against dangerous climate change, which has been downplayed in the IPCC’s reports for years.

By energy conservation I mean the overhaul of the big technological systems that wolf down fossil-fuel-produced energy. This involves other dramatic transformations: of industrial, transport and agricultural practices, and in the way people live – particularly in the cities of the global north where transport systems are based on cars (or, now, SUVs), people are encouraged to consume some goods (e.g. hamburgers) unhealthily and excessively, and live in heat-leaking, energy-inefficient buildings.

These transformations could not only forestall dangerous climate change, but also make lives better and more fulfilling.

Energy conservation 

An indication of energy conservation potential is provided by a group of energy specialists, headed by Arnalf Grubler of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, who last year published a scenario suggesting that the 1.5 degree target, along with sustainable development goals, could be met entirely by energy conservation.

The point is not that one of these groups of technology researchers is 100 percent right as against another group. Rather, that to inform a serious discussion on these issues among people who are concerned about social justice and climate justice, we need to consider the relative advantages and disadvantages not only of different types of geoengineering, but of energy conservation measures too.

The best way to challenge corporations and governments is to make this discussion our own, rather than their property. Then we will be better armed in battles over political choices that we hope not only to influence, but to take into our hands. 

This Author

Gabriel Levy is a writer with People & Nature, where this article first appeared. 

Weary eco-activists across the country were holding their breaths in 2004. They’d been fighting an epic campaign for over seven years.

The technology they were opposing had never been used in the UK. People with experience of its effects from across the world toured the country with their stories. Regions earmarked for testing on the outskirts of cities and in rural backwaters found themselves thrust into the spotlight – needing to learn about and mobilise on an incredibly complex political issue. 

In doing so they rediscovered community and built a network of solidarity across the country – gathering year on year for big demonstrations and direct action as tests were carried out first in one place and then another, and then everywhere simultaneously.

Remarkable scale

Folks based in London, Oxford, Brighton, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Glastonbury and Totnes lead the way on direct action against trial sites. People were arrested for criminal damage and under obscure legislation. Short prison sentences were served and long sentences dodged in a series of high-profile trials.

The big green charities followed, running high-profile campaigns. The issue had years of newspaper backing, but grassroots campaigns only received a year or so of national media coverage. The scale of their work as it progressed was wildly under reported. 

Small teams went out month after month, year after year, sometimes in cross country team ups on a remarkable scale. They made practical interventions that substantially damaged the industry’s progress. Adventures invisible to all but those who drove home at dawn, weary but elated.

The wider population moved from ignorance of the technology, to low level awareness, to majority opposition across party lines. But the incumbent government were standing by their friends in the industry.

Everyone knew that we’d won, everyone knew that the industry was massively behind schedule, but still the trials continued and the rhetoric said that the industry would push on through.

Blueprint for resistance 

We were tired. Once mighty local groups had fizzled away. In the final push it felt like there was no momentum left – with a couple of dozen of us standing outside parliament with a placard that said ‘What part of ‘No Genetically Modified Crops’ did you not understand?’. While inside, Chardon LL maize, the first GM variety to be made commercially available in the UK, was granted its licence.

Three weeks later there was an announcement. The manufacturers of Chardon LL would not be putting it on the market. The company explained it’s product had been left “economically non-viable” because of the conditions imposed by the Government.

There was no ban. No formal U-turn. There still isn’t.

GM trials continue to happen with occasional campaigns against them and the threat of its return is ever present. It would have been better if we could have pushed further against the importing of GM for animal feed, and subsidies for experiments. 

But fourteen years later we still live in a country that has never grown GM crops on a commercial scale. We averted increased pesticide use, the dispersal of unstable DNA, and total corporate control of the food chain. A blueprint for effective resistance was laid out.

We are powerful 

I never knew how to celebrate that win, I don’t think any of us did, and so we didn’t. I always hoped that we could make it more solid. That there would be another moment we could point to when it really was over, when we were safe.

We live in late stage-capitalism. Nothing is safe; no victories are forever.

Does that mean that we never get to call our friends and tell them that we love them? We fought as hard as we could with all the skills that we had and for a little while, in a big way, it worked.

Tory rule, the rise of the far right and a US-dominated Brexit threaten to unravel hundreds of years of progressive politics on this island. Hundreds of forgotten struggles of people just like us, who threw their lives into pushing out the boundaries one tiny step at a time, from Union rights to the NHS, the protection of seeds to energy policy.

Which is why we must remind ourselves that we are powerful, why we must dig into what has worked and hold it high and learn from it.

Change and possibility

Winning is messy. It is a bit like grieving, everyone does it differently.

When we win things change, and with it all the weight of loss and possibility change too. The communities that we’ve spun around us unravel, leaving us purposeless. Shivering in the memories of state violence and suppressed fear.

Winning isn’t easy. But it is beautiful. It should be named.

It’s worth staking a claim on here and now before it passes. We are told time and again that there is no point in trying and it’s a lie. Every time me we remind ourselves of that, we make the next win more possible.

This Author 

Liz Snook has been active part of the UK environmental direct action movement through a number of groups including Earth First! the Genetic Engineering Network, Frack Free Bristol and Reclaim the Power.

Image: Block Around the Clock, Reclaim the Power, Flickr.

Extinction Rebellion is about to take its climate change message to the pop charts, with the release of its first single.

The protest group has joined forces with Lancashire-based rock band the Jade Assembly, aiming to claim a Christmas No.1 with a song that calls for action on climate change, “before we’re all dead”.

The single, called Time For Change, comes with a video featuring footage from the group’s protests around the world in the past six months, with the main focus on London, according to newspaper reports.

Time

The video includes doctored shots of the Houses of Parliament on fire, Downing Street in flood, and MPs including former Prime Minister Theresa May wearing gas masks.

Lead vocalist John Foster sings: “So whether you’re a lucky man, a banker or a broken man, I’m standing here for everyone who’s never too afraid to say – we need you now, we need voices.

“A time to look ahead and now a time before we’re all dead, come on, it’s time for a change. I need everyone to be with me and I need everyone in here tonight to be themselves, so come on.”

Time For Change will be released early next month.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on copy supplied by PA.