Clearer labelling to show if packaging can be recycled is needed to help councils boost recycling rates, town hall chiefs have urged.

There also needs to be increased charges for hard-to-recycle products and measures to force producers to pay the full cost of disposing of their waste, the Local Government Association (LGA) said.

Labelling for all products needs to be improved, as it is often unclear and conflicting, with more than 20 different symbols that can appear on packaging – leaving consumers confused about what can and cannot be recycled.

Confusing

This can mean recyclable material ends up in landfill or incineration or that unrecyclable packaging ends up contaminating recycling streams.

While the LGA said councils had used successful initiatives to increase recycling rates in their areas, more action is needed to help them boost recycling rates and tackle the waste crisis.

The current national rate has been static at around 45% of household waste in England over the past few years – against a recycling target of at least 50% by 2020.

Research by one council, Devon County Council, found that two fifths of household waste going in the “black bin” rubbish could be recycled with the current collection services offered in the area.

Along with better labelling to make recycling less confusing for householders, there also need to be measures to charge manufacturers more to cover the costs of dealing with packaging that is hard to recycle, the LGA said.

Cash

This will encourage manufacturers to switch to recyclable alternatives and generate income for councils to invest in waste collection and recycling, as well as initiatives such as recycling campaigns and curbing fly-tipping.

Manufacturers also need to pay the full cost of recycling their packaging to encourage them to use packaging that is fully and easily dealt with.

And the next government needs to ensure councils are adequately funded to expand their services, the association said.

Last year, ministers unveiled a new waste strategy which included measures to make packaging more clearly labelled to show it is recyclable, a consistent set of materials that councils across England are expected to pick up and costs shifted onto manufacturers to pay for their products to be dealt with.

Councils have previously called for changes to waste services to be “fully funded”, with upfront cash needed to help local authorities provide standardised collections.

Producers

David Renard, Local Government Association environment spokesman, said: “Councils want to increase recycling rates.

“Clearer labelling and increased charges for hard to recycle products would help councils, manufacturers and the public be part of a vital recycling revolution.”

And he said: “If we are serious about improving recycling rates, then the next government needs to commit to reforms that ensure producers pay the full cost of recycling packaging.

“More importantly, manufacturers need to reduce waste at the point of source to stop unnecessary and unrecyclable material becoming an issue in the first place.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Populations of birds in farmland and woodlands are continuing to decline, official figures show.

Birds which breed and feed on the 75 percent of UK land which is farmed have seen declines of 55 percent since the 1970s, with the majority of the falls taking place between the late 1970s and 1980s as farmland management changed.

Over the shorter term, figures from the Environment Department (Defra) which monitor 19 species of farmland birds, show a fall of six percent between 2012 and 2017.

Conservation

Woodland birds have seen numbers fall by 29 percent since 1970, the figures show. In the shorter term, the data examining 37 birds which make their home in woodland, shows populations have declined by eight percent between 2012 and 2017.

The analysis from Defra said many farmland bird species were hit by agricultural changes such as the loss of mixed farming, a move from spring to autumn sowing of arable crops, change in grassland management, increased pesticide and fertiliser use, and the removal of hedgerows.

Corn buntings, grey partridges and tree sparrows, all of which are highly dependent on farmland, have experienced declines of more than 90% since 1970, while two others, stock doves and goldfinches, have seen numbers double.

Turtle doves have seen their numbers halve in the five year period of 2012 to 2017, with long term declines of 98% for the species celebrated in poetry and song.

The RSPB’s head of monitoring conservation science Professor Richard Gregory said: “The relentless decline of farmland bird populations in the UK continues, the latest government statistics show the Farmland Bird Index down by 55 percent since 1970.

Glimmers

“Birds in most trouble include iconic species like the grey partridge, lapwing, turtle dove, starling, skylark, and corn bunting. For many of these birds, there is a simple relationship between their fortunes and modern farming practices.

“The way we manage our land must change significantly so that farming can deliver the healthy food we need, but also deliver more for nature and contribute to climate change mitigation at the same time.”

Dr David Noble, principal ecologist at the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), said: “Despite a wide range of pressures continuing to affect many of our UK bird populations, and driving declines in many of our habitat specialists, there are a few positive stories where species could be responding to more nature-friendly management and spreading northward to suitable landscapes.”

He said that in the short term, birds such as skylarks and corn buntings have shown increases while lapwings have remained stable, but grey partridge populations are still in decline and showing no sign of recovery.

While more than half the woodland bird species monitored are showing declines, there were still small glimmers of hope in the woods, the BTO said. Song thrushes are showing a 22 percent increase in the short term, against a backdrop of long-term declines.

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent. Image: Mike Pennington. 

Extinction Rebellion (XR) has won a landmark legal challenge to an attempt by the Metropolitan Police to halt its Autumn Uprising protest in London.

During the second week of protests, the police imposed a new condition on the activists under Section 14 of the Public Order Act 1986, meaning that anyone who continued to protest after at 9pm on Monday 14th October could be arrested.

The case was lodged on behalf of XR by several politicians including baroness Jenny Jones and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, and high-profile figures such as Guardian columnist George Monbiot.

Judgement

Lord Justice Dingemans and Justice Chamberlain ruled in favour of the activists, saying that the police had acted unlawfully because the wording of Section 14 is clear that there is no power to prohibit a gathering that has not yet begun, and that it could only be used to impose conditions.

Tobias Garnett, a human rights lawyer for XR, said: “Extinction Rebellion is delighted with the court’s decision,” Tobias said. “It vindicates our belief that the police’s blanket ban on our protests was an unprecedented and unlawful infringement on the right to protest.”

Anyone arrested during the ban who has not been charged with other offences could now sue the police for false imprisonment, XR said.

In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said that it would respect the decision of the court, and consider the judgement before deciding on next steps. The decision to take action against the protest had not been taken lightly, it said.

Uprising

Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Nick Ephgrave said: “We firmly believed that the continuation of the situation was untenable.”

The lock-ons, disruption to public transport, obstruction of the roads and encampments in various unauthorised locations created “unacceptable and prolonged disruption” to Londoners, and the police felt that bringing an end to the protest was “both reasonable and proportionate,” Ephgrave said, adding: “I want to be clear; we would not and cannot ban protest.”

During the protests, three bridges were temporarily closed, more than 150 bus routes diverted, and officers pulled away from work in local communities to the city centre.

Officers made a total of 1,828 arrests during the uprising, with 165 people charged as of 6 November. The Metropolitan Police has estimated that the protests have cost it over £24 million.

This Author 

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

The State of Nature in Britain report was published last month as the Green Party gathered in Newport for its autumn conference.

The report showed that despite a greatly increased focus on the loss of biodiversity and bioabundance in the national conversation in Britain since the first such report in 2013, the decline of our natural world continues, in what is already one of the most nature-depleted nations in the world.

Often the focus is on saving threatened, charismatic species, but what we’re facing is a massive collapse of natural systems, of the bulk and resilience of our natural world – the world on which we depend.

Doughnut Economics 

Reserves, rescue projects, planting schemes and land management for individual species are all very well, but it was an emergency motion to conference responding to the report, presented by Green MP Caroline Lucas, that got to the heart of the issue: our economy, and its continued, disastrous, focus on growth.

The motion called for the prioritisation of the environment in all government decision-making and adoption of alternatives to GDP growth as measures of success. 

It drew on the work of the Institute for Public Policy Research, hardly known as radical environmentalists, in developing the idea of a Sustainable Economy Act that acknowledges the collapse of nature, as well as the threat of the climate emergency, as already covered by the Climate Change Act of 2008. The motion, like the IPPR’s work, calls for binding targets on biodiversity, soil health and air quality. 

The IPPR’s work might not have used the term Doughnut Economics, but it comes very close to accepting its principles in saying that all government departments have to be held to account for the environmental impacts on their decisions.

The motion at Green Party conference acknowledged that we can’t just be thinking about the state of nature in the UK, but working, fast, to cut the impact of our consumption of products made abroad on nature and natural systems all around the world.

What is needed is radical changes in systems, in laws, in thinking. We only had to look around us to see that.

Event organising 

Our conference organisers, and the staff at the newly opened venue, had worked hard to make this as green a conference as possible, but there are so many barriers and assumptions that underlie ‘how things are done’ that are difficult or impossible to break by individual effort alone.

First, and most strikingly, is the fact that this new venue is in a location with virtually no public transport. There’s a No 9 bus, occasionally, stopping there, and finishing early in the evening.

Walking to the centre is a confusing maze that involves finding a route through twisting motorways. This is clearly a convention centre built for visitors (and probably mostly staff too) to drive to.

Then there was the normal ways in which things are done. Disposable cups are clearly the standard offering for hot drinks in the venue (although most Green Party members of course brought their own) – but why, in an enclosed, contained space like this, are reusable cups not standard?

Choices

We had bottled water for speakers – why not carafes of eau de tap, the cheapest, and certainly most environmentally friendly, option?

There are still so many basic, easy wins that have to be grounded in an acceptance that no waste should be created unless absolutely unavoidable, no resources consumed when they could be conserved.

Public and active transport should be the normal way to get around. Facilities need to be built to cater to that. And certainly in Newport there’s no shortage of potential brownfield sites close to transport so this can be done.

That those things aren’t the case is the result of policy choices, and of decisions to ignore and allow externalised costs to be imposed on all of us.

Acknowledging the crucial need to reshape the frame in which we make decision – the way in which are economy is run – is crucial to tackling our multiple emergencies.

This Author 

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

Image: ICC Wales Conference Centre, Green Party. 

A great deal has changed in the UK over the last 75 years. Technology has progressed exponentially; social attitudes have changed and whole industries have come and gone. Diets have also shifted markedly in this time.

The World War II and immediate post-war era were defined by food rationing until this was lifted in 1954. Over the following decades there was a huge increase in animal product consumption.

Today, we are seeing a startling rise in the consumption of plant-based food and people shunning animal products altogether and identifying as vegan.

Variety

The number of vegans in the UK quadrupled between 2014 and 2019 and many people who still eat animal products are now choosing more plant-based foods for health and environmental reasons.

Claims around the healthiness of vegan diets provoke mixed reactions. For some, vegan diets are considered to be inherently unhealthy and are put off veganism because of this.

But for others, veganism is thought to be automatically healthy and is their primary motivation for going vegan or at least eating a fully plant-based diet.

Recent Netflix documentary, The Game Changers, shows a whole host of elite athletes who swear that a plant-based diet gives them the edge they need to succeed.

As usual, the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. Veganism can be a really healthy choice. As with any diet, you should eat a wide variety of foods to ensure you are getting everything you need to truly thrive.

Ethical

A vegan diet consisting purely of chips and Oreos is not going to be healthy, in the same way that living off cheeseburgers and milkshakes isn’t either.

People have been celebrating World Vegan Day this month, which also marked 75 years since The Vegan Society was founded by Donald Watson. World Vegan Day offers a chance for reflection on just how far veganism has come in three quarters of a century.

To celebrate our 75th anniversary, The Vegan Society has launched a new campaign: ‘Vegan and Thriving’. We want to ensure that people know that you can be healthy and thrive on a vegan diet – despite popular misconceptions around vegan nutrition.

A recent survey revealed that 52 percent of people had health concerns about going vegan and there have been some inaccurate media scare stories of late also.

The British Dietetic Association (BDA) is the body that registers dietitians in the UK – a trusted organisation made up of experts on all things diet related. Dietitians are the only nutrition professionals that are statutorily regulated and governed by an ethical code to ensure they always work to the highest standard.

Misconceptions

The BDA have confirmed several times that a ‘well-planned vegan diet can support healthy living in people of all ages.’ This includes young infants, children, adults and those pregnant and breastfeeding.

The NHS agrees that: “With good planning and an understanding of what makes up a healthy, balanced vegan diet, you can get all the nutrients your body needs.” This shows that the common fear that a vegan diet cannot be healthy is unfounded.

Still the most common question vegans get asked is, “where do you get your protein from?”

This question stems from the idea that protein is only available from animal sourced foods. If protein were only available from other animals, where do all those large herbivores like rhinoceros, elephants and gorillas, get their protein from? Plants of course.

All plants have some degree of protein in them and there are many plant foods that are really high in protein, such as beans, peas, lentils, and some nuts and seeds. But despite this, popularly held misconceptions can be hard to shift.

Thrive

Veganism being a healthy choice links to the recent news story that healthier food choices almost always benefit the environment.

The most sophisticated research on this topic yet, completed by Oxford University, showed that poor diet not only threatens people’s health but also causes environmental damage, whilst healthier options had much less impact on the planet.

Fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains are examples of foods that were healthy for both people and the planet. Red and processed meat causes the most ill health and pollution, but it is noted that the biggest environmental gains were from replacing any meat with plant-based foods.

Time is running out for us to make the environmental changes we need in order to avert catastrophic runaway climate change. Similarly, diet-related non-communicable diseases like type-2 diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and certain types of cancer, are increasing, with treatment costs in the billions of pounds annually.

The environmental benefits of vegan diets are well documented but less well known is the fact that all of these non-communicable illnesses are less commonly found amongst vegans. Clearly veganism and plant-based diets have an important role to play in tackling these huge global problems we are facing.

We hope that no one is put off veganism for health reasons. You can not only be healthy and vegan you can truly thrive, which will help our planet to thrive as well. 

This Author

Mark Banahan is campaigns manager at The Vegan Society. If you would like to find out more about veganism, vegan nutrition and our new campaign Vegan and Thriving, please check out our website here. @MarkBanahan

Somehow I’d ended up on a plastic mattress in a tiny prison cell wearing the infamous orange jump suit. I’d been arrested once before in Egypt during the revolution as a journalist, but now I was in Wisconsin, America, where freedom of speech is enshrined in the constitution. I’d considered myself safe there.  

I had been arrested whilst filming a small, peaceful protest by mainly Indigenous Ojibwe people against the construction of a new oil pipeline. I was working on a documentary film on America’s struggle for clean water.  

Controversial pipelines

Enbridge’s Line 3 will carry 760,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil from Canada, across the American border to a refinery on Lake Superior, Wisconsin.  Almost as much oil as the controversial Keystone XL.  

The oil will then flow through the ageing Line 5 pipeline that sits on the bottom of the Straits of Mackinac – a volatile water way connecting two of America’s Great Lakes – Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, a fifth of the world’s fresh surface water. Line 5 was built to last fifty years.  It is now sixty-six years old. 

Experts say that if the pipeline ruptures, spewing oil into the fresh waters of the Great Lakes, the results will be catastrophic.  Worst-case-scenario modelling undertaken by the Graham Sustainability Institute at the University of Michigan predicts an oil spill could impact over one-thousand kilometres of shoreline and create an oil patch on the lake two hundred kilometres squared in just five days. If it happens in winter when the lake is frozen over, little is known how that would affect a spill nor how a clean-up operation would or even could take place.  Enbridge state this is purely hypothetical since it’s so unlikely.  But with statistics like these it’s no wonder that Enbridge wanted to stamp out any opposition to their new pipeline. 

The protest came on the heels of the movement for clean water against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in which Enbridge are investors. At the height of that movement ten thousand people had camped out in the proposed oil pipeline pathway in Standing Rock for almost a year.

So, despite the fact that on that chilly morning in Wisconsin there were only fifteen peaceful protestors holding placards and one man chained to a digger machine, six were arrested and charged.  Five protesters and myself, a journalist filming the protest.  I had become one of a growing number of journalists to be arrested and harassed in America, which has slumped to 48th in the Press Freedom Index, below Botswana and Romania.  

Disease and genocide 

My journey here began on the Navajo Native American reservation, which spans the states of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. 

I had heard that this First Nations’ community were also dealing with water contamination. Almost 40 percent of people here live below the poverty line and have no running water.  

Nothing prepared me for what I saw. Whole communities were living amidst piles of radioactive waste from the historic uranium mining that fuelled the Cold War arms race from the 1940s to the 1980s. 

When the bottom fell out of the uranium market, the mining companies declared bankruptcy and left behind open pit mines, which filled with rainwater. Children swam in them and the sheep – the food staple of the Navajo – drank the water.  So did the people.  

The first signs were in the livestock. Helen Nez, now an elderly lady, told me that her sheep were born with deformities, some without eyes.  Not knowing the reason, she continued to water her flock at the open pit.  

Tragically Nez drank there herself while she was pregnant and two of her children were born with a DNA depleting disease.  “I told the doctors over and over again that we live in the midst of a uranium mine, but nobody listened to me” says Nez wiping tears from her eyes.

Instead the white doctors at the local clinic told her it was because Indians practice inbreeding and chased her and her sick child out of the hospital.  The disease – labelled Navajo Neuropathy – has since been shown to be the result of exposure to uranium. Nez’s daughter Euphemia was later taken to the University of New Mexico Hospital where Dr Russell Snyder confirmed the illness was related to exposure to uranium, but that she had no chance of survival. Her two children died painful deaths prematurely.  

Nez believes this is part of the genocide the Navajo and other Indigenous Americans have been subjected to by the US government. “My vision is that one day someone will be held responsible”, says Nez.

Uranium exposure

There has been some clean up on the Navajo Nation. Most recently the Tronox Inc. bankruptcy settlement has provided almost $1 billion to clean up about 50 abandoned uranium mines in and around the Navajo Nation.

But the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) say there’s 523 abandoned mine sites and with more than one mine at each site, perhaps over 1000 abandoned mines and additional piles of waste, left blowing in the wind.  For the wells and springs contaminated with uranium, there’s no cleanup.

Armed with a geiger counter to measure radiation, and some training in using it from Nuclear Engineering Professor Kim Kearfott, I set out to take my own readings in and around the reservation. 

At a number of sites I detected extremely high levels.  But it was at one of the main entrances to the Grand Canyon National Park, at an abandoned uranium mill in Cameron Arizona, where I shocked Professor Kearfott – maxing out her geiger counter at over 5000 mR/hr – levels she said are much higher than those recorded in evacuated areas around Chernobyl.  

Back at her Michigan lab Professor Kearfott explained: “When uranium is mined it is brought up to the surface and poses a cancer risk. At the levels we’re talking about here you’ll start to see kidney disease before you would likely see the effects of radiation.  Also lung cancer, bone cancers and leukemias.  If you ingest uranium you have internal exposure. We become more radioactive when we inhale it, eat it or drink it in water.”  

Abandoned mines

Professor Kearfott explained that, in 24 hours spent at that one site, I had been exposed to the equivalent of a year’s maximum dose of radiation for a nuclear worker. 

But when I met Jon Indall from the Uranium Producers of America, he told me the mine waste left on the reservation wasn’t very radioactive. In fact, he went further and told me, with a chuckle, that even with enriched uranium “you could eat it, we wouldn’t really advise you to do that, but it’s not terribly dangerous.” 

As a uranium industry spokesman, he must have known what he was saying was nonsense but perhaps, if I were an ordinary citizen or legislator ruling on allowing more uranium mining, I might not know any better.  

There is an estimated ten to fifteen thousand abandoned uranium mines across the Western United States and no one knows what condition they are in.  Professor Kearfott spoke of one such abandoned mine that she had located in a school yard on the Lakota reservation in South Dakota. It has dangerously high radiation levels. She tells me that it’s situations like that that keep her up at night.  

There’s been no comprehensive investigation or health assessment on the Navajo reservation. “We don’t even have cancer screening”, declares Janene Yazzie, a young Navajo woman from the town of Sanders. It took a Tommy Rock, a Navajo PhD student who undertook his own water tests in 2015 as part of his final paper, to prove what Sanders’ residents had long suspected – their water was contaminated with uranium at twice the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards.

Janene helped Tommy mobilise the community for water testing, but she is no bystander. Janene and her family live in Sanders. Her little boy, Solaris, has drunk contaminated water from the school fountains. 

Janene attended that same school and is left wondering whether the ovarian cancer she had in her early twenties was caused by the water.  Tests undertaken by Dr Cheryl Dyer, an expert in reproductive physiology, found that uranium contaminated water, at levels similar to that found on the Navajo reservation, acted like estrogen.

Reading my blank face Dyer explained: “What that means is it gave the rats gynecological cancers, like uterine and ovarian cancer. Given some of the health problems that are well-known on the reservation – young high school age girls having hysterectomies and so forth – it makes you think is there a link between this exposure to uranium in your drinking water to health problems that result maybe decades later”.

Contaminated water

In that spring of 2015, around the same time residents in Sanders, Arizona proved that their water was contaminated, so did residents in Flint, Michigan, on the other side of the country.

In her little office in a church basement, Flint community organiser Nayyirah Sharrif told me: “Immediately after the switch the water changed. It would come out looking like chicken broth or dark liquor. Sometimes it would smell like poop.”

It’s a cold snowy day in 2016, but the church is busy and a line of people are waiting outside. This is not a scene of the faithful, but rather of the desperate. The church gives out free bottled water, which is precious because residents’ tap water is contaminated with lead and bacteria. 

The City of Flint had been put under a financial manager by Michigan’s State Governor Rick Snyder, who decided to take Flint off the Detroit water system, which draws water from Lake Huron, and instead hook them up to the Flint river. 

Water was now treated at the local Flint plant, despite independent engineering reports saying the plant would not be able to adequately treat the water without a multi-million-dollar upgrade.  

Elin Betanzo, a former EPA water quality expert instrumental in uncovering the Flint water crisis, said: “The last time the Flint water treatment plant was operated for providing the community with drinking water on a full time basis was either in the late 50s or early 60s. The Safe Drinking Water Act came after that in 1991. So the Flint water treatment plant was never operated up to today’s standards.”

Socioeconomic status

The foreman at the water plant warned that people would die if the switch in water systems went ahead. But it April 2014 they did it anyway. 

The river water was corrosive and began to dissolve the lead in the water pipes, contaminating the water with lead.  Lead stunts children’s brain development, leading to lower IQs. 

Flint doctor Laura Carravallah tells me: “I’m encouraged that all of the kids have Medicaid, but it only lasts for five years. This is not a five-year problem. People who have brain damage due to lead are going to have ongoing challenges.” As a doctor, she says she feels ashamed of what happened on her watch, and her powerlessness to stop it.

Carravallah continued: “We know that socioeconomic status is the most important indicator of health, with education coming right along behind, and yet we don’t attend to those things in this country. This is a big problem and I think that the Flint water crisis has highlighted for people just a flavour of the result of that might be if we let this inequality continue”.  

Unchecked power

The effects of chronic low level lead exposure on adults are less well studied. Numerous Flint residents complained to me about seizures, black outs, foggy thinking, joint ache and lethargy since the water switch.  The fertility rate dropped in Flint and there was an increase in foetal deaths and miscarriages, over the same period.  Deadly bacteria called legionella is known to have killed twelve people, but doctors think the actual numbers could be closer to one hundred and ninety – numbers of pneumonia deaths doubled during the water switch and some of these victims may have had legionella. 

Diane Young and her family are holding a birthday celebration at the grave of her daughter, who would have been thirty today.  In between hushing her two grandchildren, whom she now cares for, she tells me how her daughter, Shyonda Robertson, was at first misdiagnosed with pneumonia: “By the time doctors realised she had Legionnaires she was in a coma. She was having 150 seizures a day.” Diane’s daughter died shortly after contracting the disease, when the doctors could not revive her and turned the ventilators off. 

How could this have happened in one of the richest democracies in the world?

Curt Guyette, an investigative journalist who broke the story of the water contamination, said: “Michigan’s emergency manager is what’s technically known as a receivership law and it is the most extreme law of its type in the United States. This law allows the state to take over financially struggling cities, stripping all the authority of duly elected local officials.

“They have ultimate unchecked power. One thing that the law specifies that they cannot do is miss a bond payment, which I think is crucial to the real purpose of the law. So, they can take away healthcare from retirees and whatever is necessary to balance the books.” 

Racist policy 

In the midst of the crisis, the General Motors plant complained to the state that the river water was corroding their car parts. They were switched back onto the Detroit water system – no more corrosion.

But when people marched down to city hall with jugs of brown water and bags filled with their hair that was falling out they were ignored. Guyette said: “If anyone wants to know what running government like a business looks like, I tell them to come to Flint.”

The emergency manager law has only ever been enacted in majority black cities. For Nayyirah Sharrif, this is a clear indication that the law is a racist policy tool: “There hasn’t been in a poor white city that’s received an emergency manager yet. And we have a bunch of them. That’s very disheartening and it just feels like some areas aren’t deserving of full democracy. Now we pay the highest rates in the country for water, that now we can’t use and it’s poisoned people and it’s killed people”. 

Flint residents would often angrily question why no officials had been jailed for the Flint water crisis.  So I went to meet water lawyer Noah Hall, an expert adviser to Michigan’s now former Attorney General, Bill Schuette, on the state’s criminal investigation.  

Wasn’t it is a crime to have known the water was contaminated and was harming people?  “That’s not necessarily a crime, no.  The environmental laws in the United States do not prohibit pollution, poisoning, and the loss of human life due to unsafe water. Quite the opposite.  It’s an accepted cost of doing business.”  

Hall went on to explain how the law works: “The amount of pollution that is allowed under the environmental laws is determined through a methodology that begins fundamentally with valuing a human life in dollars. And if in doing that math the result is that the cost of preventing the pollution is more than the system values the human life, then the pollution is permitted”.  

Naively I thought that children must be highly valued in this equation. I was wrong. “Children are undervalued. It works in reverse, so that the child’s life that’s going to be lost in 20 years is worth far less than a life that day, according to the system”. 

Profits over people

What ties these stories together is poverty, environmental racism and a system that prioritises profits over people. 

Academic studies have shown that African Americans are more likely to live near landfills and industrial plants. More than half of the nine million people living near hazardous waste sites are people of colour and a quarter of the most toxic waste dumps are on Native land. 

But what also unites the Flint and Navajo stories is how the communities organised, worked with independent scientists to conduct their own water tests and prove the authorities wrong.

Overuse, contamination and climate change are posing an existential threat to clean water across the world. According to the United Nations, by 2030 demand for clean water will outstrip supply by 40 percent. As Maud Barlow of Food and Water Watch states: “There simply will not be enough drinking water for everyone and it will be segregated to those who can afford it.”

Chemicals

It’s not only heavy metals that pose a danger to water quality. 

Former EPA water quality expert Elin Betanzo explained: “Lead and copper are the only regulated contaminants that we sample for in customers’ homes. And it’s actually more straightforward because you know it’s in the pipe, compared to a whole variety of contaminants that might be in the source water. 

“Any chemical that is produced anywhere either goes into our air emissions and deposits in our surface water bodies or it runs off the pavement or land, such as fertiliser run off. So literally any chemical in the world could be in our source water.”  

What might be the impact of this exposure to our health and that of future generations? Dana Dolinoy, the NSF International Chair of Environmental Sciences at the Michigan School of Public Health, answered: “When you’re exposed to chemicals via what we eat or the air we breathe or the water that we drink then they can affect our biology. But if you go on to become pregnant or a male who goes on to become a dad later in life, those cells can be transmitted to the next generation our children and potentially to the following generations. And there’s various different molecular ways that these exposures can be inherited across generations.”

This is why I was far from my home in London making a film about water contamination and the fight for water rights in America, because, like climate change, it matters to all of us. 

Social responsibility? 

So what happened to my charges?  The oil pipeline company demanded $85,000 in compensation from a protest of fifteen people.

Enbridge are the biggest oil pipeline company in North America and bring a lot of money into the state of Wisconsin. They say they’ve paid $42.8 million in 2018 in tax revenues and employed 279 Wisconsin-based workers.

The company also take on responsibilities of cash strapped states, providing equipment and vehicles to the emergency services in the states where they operate. Whilst this could be seen as corporate social responsibility, does it also give them undue influence? 

Eventually I was fortunate enough that a high profile First Amendment lawyer, Henry Kaufman, was willing to take on my case. As soon as he got involved, the Wisconsin District Attorney, who, until then, wouldn’t return any of my previous lawyer’s phone calls, was promising to sort out my case.

The criminal charges were dropped and I accepted a civil trespass charge, so my nightmare went away.  But journalists are facing an unprecedented crackdown, especially when covering civil dissent of state or corporate policies.  

My documentary ‘Thirst For Justice’ is an exploration of the fight for safe drinking water for everyone, is nominated for Best Feature Documentary and Best UK Feature at London’s Raindance Film Festival.  If you would like to organise a screening in your community please get in touch or keep in touch via facebook.

This Author 

Leana Hosea is a multimedia investigative journalist for the BBC and director of the documentary ‘Thirst For Justice’.

The Liberal Democrats are pledging to invest £15 billion over the next parliament insulating homes to tackle climate change and fuel poverty.

Plans to upgrade the energy efficiency of 26 million homes by 2030 with measures such as insulation, double-glazing and new heating systems would save the average household £550 a year on bills, the Lib Dems claim.

And they plan to prioritise fuel-poor households so all low-income homes are insulated by 2025.

Irreversable

At the weekend, Labour pledged work to install loft insulation, double glazing and renewable and low-carbon technologies in almost every home by 2030, creating 450,000 jobs and costing a Labour government £60 billion.

The Lib Dems said capital spending of £3 billion a year over the next parliament would incentivise households to upgrade their homes, provide fully subsidised insulation to those in fuel poverty, and leverage finance from private sources. 

There are also plans to double solar and wind power by 2030, bringing the amount of electricity generated by renewables up to 80% of the mix.

Wera Hobhouse, Liberal Democrat spokesman for the climate emergency, said: “The climate crisis is doing irreversible damage to our planet.

Energy efficiency

“The Liberal Democrats are committed to climate action now so we can protect our planet for future generations.”

She accused the Tories of banning onshore wind, slashing support for solar power and cancelling the green deal, a largely unsuccessful policy to encourage homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their homes, saying their moves were “no better than climate change denial”.

“We would raise efficiency standards of every home and more than double the amount of electricity we generate from renewables.”

It is the latest “green” salvo by parties in the early stages of the General Election campaign, in which, despite the dominance of Brexit, climate change is expected to be a key issue for many voters.

Organisations ranging from the National Infrastructure Commission to environmental and anti-poverty campaigners have called on the government to make improving the energy efficiency of homes a national priority.

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent. Image: Liberal Democrats.

Children believe that spending time in nature can give their school work a boost, according to research.

A new study into the impact of outdoor activity on children’s wellbeing suggests that being outside can also make youngsters feel more confident and capable of trying new things.

The Wildlife Trusts, which commissioned the study, said the findings show that children experience “profound and diverse benefits” through having regular contact with nature, and that every child should have the chance to “experience the joy of wildlife in daily life.”

Relationships

Researchers at University College London’s (UCL) Institute of Education studied children taking part in outdoor activities, such as identifying plants and trees and considering the needs of wildlife habitats, with their local Wildlife Trust.

A total of 451, mostly aged eight and nine, children in 12 areas of England were asked to complete surveys before and after they took part in the events. Almost 200 of these children were also observed and interviewed about their experiences.

The findings showed that after spending time in nature, almost eight in 10 (79 percent) said they felt the experience could help their school work.

More than eight in 10 (84 percent) said they felt they are capable of new things when they try, and nine in 10 (90%) felt they learned something new about the natural world.

Some 79 percent said they felt more confident in themselves, while the same proportion felt they had better relationships with their classmates. And 81 percent thought they had better relationships with their teachers.

Nature’s sake

Nigel Doar, the Wildlife Trusts’ director of strategy, said: “This research shows that children experience profound and diverse benefits through regular contact with nature. Contact with the wild improves children’s wellbeing, motivation and confidence.

“The data also highlights how children’s experiences in and around the natural world led to better relationships with their teachers and classmates.

“The Wildlife Trusts believe everyone should have the opportunity to experience the joy of wildlife in daily life and we’re calling on government to recognise the multiple benefits of nature for children – and ensure that at least one hour per school day is spent outdoors learning and playing in wild places.”

Professor Michael Reiss, of UCL’s Institute of Education, said: “Each generation seems to have less contact with the outdoors than the preceding one. We owe it to all young people to reverse this trend – for their sakes, for our sakes and for nature’s sake.”

This Author

Alison Kershaw is the PA education correspondent.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) has achieved an amazing feat. Its multiple and large-scale actions have pushed the climate crisis to the fore and pressured decision makers to take drastic action to work to secure a better future for all species. 

XR has been able to motivate ordinary people to participate in peaceful civil disobedience and to break from business as usual by building on the work of past social and environmental movements, as well as the renewed urgency created by the release of the 1.5 IPCC report approximately one year ago.

The reaction from the Home Office has been to ban protests related to XR. The group must be doing something right to draw the ire of the state. The ban only emboldened XR to continue and new people to join their ranks. We are thankful to all who have made these protests happen, many who have taken action on the streets for the first time in their life. 

Justice 

However, the action to shutdown public transport at rush hour exposed many weaknesses in XR’s strategy and decision-making process. This action was undertaken despite principled objections from the majority of rebels. It demonstrated that XR needs to rethink its decision-making processes and find a way to prioritise accountability within a decentralised movement. 

This action also demonstrated the truth to some early criticisms of the movement and its messaging – that it chose to ignore the role of capitalism and colonialism in creating the climate crisis.

Thankfully there are groups within XR such as the international Global Justice Rebellion that are pushing XR to include a fourth demand: global climate justice. We hope that this will bring deeper strategic thinking to future actions.    

We are heartened that the vast majority of rebels were opposed to this action and that XR values openly challenging itself and the toxic system, as well as reflecting, learning and welcoming everyone.

We ourselves are people of colour (Poc) residing in Europe who have been actively involved in the global climate justice movement for over a decade. Here we offer our analysis of how XR can and must do better. 

The strongest weapon of non-violent movements is people power and it is not strategic – neither is it ethical – to alienate marginalised communities.  

Maximising arrest

As the grandchildren of those who resisted British colonial rule in South Asia, we wholeheartedly support civil disobedience and know that all successful movements include an element of sacrifice.  

But civil disobedience does not necessarily mean arrest. Many civil disobedience movements have managed to achieve change without mass arrests. XR will need to be more agile if it is to keep the authorities, the fossil fuel industry and financiers guessing about what will come next. 

For example in Chile, the miners association called for non-cooperation by driving below the speed limit, not sending children to school, and banging pots and pans every evening at 8pm. Through such actions, it became clear that the opposition to Pinochet was growing without forcing people to land in harsh jails. 

Fetishisation and glorification of arrests individualises collective acts and belittles how those that look different than the majority of rebels are treated by the police. Focussing on individual arrests plays into a neoliberal focus on personal pursuit and exceptional action, rather than building community. 

This strategy has been detrimental to people of colour (PoC) joining and identifying with XR. Getting arrested can be a rather small sacrifice for an upper-middle class white man in his mid-fifties and he is likely to be treated respectfully by the police, whereas the transgendered black British youth with a disability born to Caribbean immigrants will have a very different experience. 

A Facebook post from Roger Hallam exemplifies his lack of understanding about how others experience imprisonment, and assumes that the majority of people can afford a court case and will face no consequences if they do not show up to work for an extended time. 

Advocating for disruption and non-cooperation – in small and big ways, everyday and collectively – would be more inclusive and is likely going to increase the movement’s impact. 

Embedding anti-oppression 

While XR has done a phenomenal job of building a movement with strong principles, one that many people feel they can identify with, the ways in which these principles are put into practice has been uneven. 

Sending flowers and a thank you note to staff at the Brixton police station, where three young black men died in custody in recent years, is disrespectful towards those who have their rights trampled on daily by the police and the state.

Similarly, asking the courts to prosecute knife-crime rather than non-violent protesters shows a lack of understanding about how institutional racism and austerity measures have impacted communities of colour.   

We strongly recommend that rebels participate in a continuous practice of anti-oppression analysis and self reflection, applying this to how they fight for climate justice.

Adapting strategy

Mass action and ‘whirlwind’ moments do not happen in isolation, without outreach or deep community organising – as the Engler brothers point out in their book This is an Uprising. This means that sometimes one has to go slowly at first in order to go fast later.

Additionally, this analysis by Nafeez Ahmed points out that XR has not taken into account the differences between protesting to avert climate crisis and overthrowing authoritarian regimes propped up by the police. 

A deeper understanding of the case studies and empirical evidence should have translated into finding weak spots and sympathetic people within the ranks of those sectors primarily responsible for the climate crisis, such as the fossil fuel industry, bureaucrats, banks and insurance companies.

Migration 

People have always been on the move and will continue to be so.

In today’s world many of the factors contributing to displacement and migration are related to the legacy of colonialism, such as political instability, war or economic inequality, and to climate impacts. 

If we are able to use this crisis as an opportunity to create a more just world, we can expect that a number of drivers of immigration will become less acute. But arguing for immigration controls as a climate response is massively unjust.

While it is good that XR supports climate refugees, what about other types of refugees? Where do climate refugees start and stop? If you are a farmer and face desertification, a slow process linked to climate change, and decide to flee, are you a climate refugee or an economic refugee? This differentiation among types of refugees creates unnecessary divisions. 

XR must actively work to include activists from migrant communities if it is to fully embed global justice in its strategic workings. At the same time, as a decentralised movement it must work to remain accountable at all levels, in order to avoid replicating structures of oppression. 

Industrial complex

Rather than simply maximising disruption in public spaces, XR must focus its aim on the fossil fuel industrial complex – those who have cut subsidies or blocked investment in public transport infrastructure, transport ministries promoting roads over rail, automobile manufacturers, financial and banking companies investing in fossil fuels or infrastructures, and of course the oil, gas and coal companies themselves, such as BP.

These actors are fuelling the crisis and their power has to be removed. At the same time, marginalised communities bearing the brunt of climate impacts and economic inequality must be actively empowered. 

We must learn from the Gilet Jaunes movement in France and the current uprising in Chile. 

While science indicates that we must quickly stop emitting greenhouse gases, it does not indicate how we do this. That is up to us – we must provide a vision of how our lives can improve for everyone in a carbon free society and how we get there in a socially just manner.  We hope that XR can expand its demands to include how greenhouse gas emissions can be stopped in a socially just manner. 

Diversifying 

Social movements are successful when they are able to increase support from those who have previously demonstrated passive opposition, and when they are able to diversify an active base.

Within its own ranks, a number of XR groups including XR Youth, XR Slough, XR Scotland, the XR International Solidarity Network, and Global Justice Rebellion are proactively and constructively addressing oppression within the group. They should be listened to and be a part of the leadership within XR.

There are numerous working class, disabled, immigrant and/or activists of colour across the globe who have been a part of the climate and other social justice movements for many years. They should be consulted in an effort to incorporate demands from the most impacted communities and to build meaningful relationships. These groups must have a place at the table and XR must be willing to modify its structure, culture, messaging and tactics based on their inputs. 

By making these changes, XR will be stronger, more effective and strategic. With diverse widespread support across large swathes of society, the government will have no choice but to stop protecting the fossil fuel industry and financiers, as well as make climate justice a reality for all.

These Authors 

Payal Parekh is an international climate activist and former programme director of 350.org. Asad Rehman is the executive director of War on Want. 

Image credit: Talia Woodin, Extinction Rebellion. 

Campaigners have written to the Romanian government to condemn the killings of two forest rangers, and urged the government to dismantle the country’s network of timber mafia.

Forest ranger Liviu Pop was out investigating illegal logging in Maramures, in the northwestern region of the country, when he was shot dead.

His death came shortly after that of Raducu Gorcioaia, who was murdered in the forest district of Pascani earlier in October.

Criminal network

These deaths were “disturbing” in themselves, the letter states, but the fact that these rangers had to risk their personal safety to defend the country’s old-growth forests and when forest protections are already included in Romanian law was “unforgivable”.

The letter was signed by over 40 environmental groups from around the world and appealed directly to president Klaus Iohannis of Romania and the government for a thorough and unbiased investigation into the killings.

Those who work to protect forests should not only have adequate legal protection, but also it needed to be enforced, the letter said.

The government must also take action against the criminals who are responsible for illegal logging, they said.

366,000 hectares of Romanian forest was illegally logged between 1990 and 2011. In recent years there has been widespread logging even within Natura 4 2000 sites, which should be protected by EU law, the NGOs noted.  

Last month, EuroNatur, Agent Green and ClientEarth filed a complaint against the Romanian government with the European Commission for illegal logging in Natura 2000 sites.

This Author 

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