Climate Change

Diminishing Voids

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

At times it can seem hard to know how best to place our efforts, even whether those efforts will ever prove fruitful, whether they are worth themselves at all. Above all the myriad things we may face, which do not need any rehearsal – a cost-of-living crisis where we scrabble to fix metaphorical roofs high amongst them – above all of this there is the knowledge of that great existential crisis of the climate, not so much an elephant in the room as a kind of collective howling at the door.  Is doing anything at all quite futile in the face of the scale of the challenge?  Are we all in the UK with our languid, moist and merciful, perhaps somewhat desultory summer archetypes of the famed relaxed dogs on the sofa while the walls this time adopt the metaphor, licked with flames of distant forest fires; so easy to dismiss with a click of a switch, so difficult to forget?

Perhaps it’s a question of choice.  We can choose for instance to ignore it all, to continue to ignore it, literally screen it out with a surfeit of devices and their myriad balms and distractions.  Or we can fall into embittered enmity; rehearse our woes while doing nothing to address them.  Perhaps the biggest choice is, knowing what we know, can we really not do anything at all – through despondency or lack of drive or just not knowing how on earth we can start to respond when perhaps all we need to do, if just for a moment, is listen?

Beneath the apparent disregard or callousness there’s a deep well of something else in all of us, a well that all the phones, the hours lost to films and mini-series or scrolling socials, the buzz of pints, the near oblivion from anything else we may throw down our throats or clog our consciousness with, there’s a well that none of this can dry or fathom – a well of true feeling, an almost insatiable hunger for life, true life; not a technological chimera or booze-induced haze or mirage, but a feeling of how we are all meant to be; clear, connected – in the most meaningful way – connected and sorted and free.

None of this is to say that any of these things are necessarily bad in themselves but probably most of us rely on them more than we could some of the time, and some people much more than that. But perhaps, just maybe, maybe; if we can drink a little deeper and more often from that well when the scramble for sustenance and sanity allows, we may be able to look at our various dilemmas with a kind of clarity that engenders some kind of meaningful action, a clarity that informs and reminds us that there are myriad people out there striving and endeavouring to help, that we can join with their efforts, augment them, strive to do right by the times.

If we can do so, prise open the door just about long enough, squeeze out of the bars of the cage, we may find out there lights in the darkness; pinpoints of distant semaphores or visual morse that can guide us, help us to do what we can; silent suggestions that there is still a way, that there are still things we can do.

One such suggestion, and I do not know how I first heard it – dropped like a pearl in my inbox one morning perhaps – is the initiative over the Climate and Ecology Bill.  This proposed legislation was introduced years ago now, but it was re-introduced to the ‘Commons this Spring and is set for further debate in a couple of months.

There’s a great deal you can say about the Bill – the clue’s in the title – but it offers above all two things; a constructive, pragmatic, if admittedly ambitious road map as to how we can get our house in order in the UK regarding the Bill’s twin concerns and how we as communities and individuals can get on board and contribute in a tangible, realistic and meaningful way.

You can read all about the specifics of the Bill at the national website; the 40 peers and 127 MPs of all parties already on board, the backing of eminent scientists, CPRE, the Wildlife Trusts, the Co-operative Bank and many other businesses, 30,000 members of the public. You can read all about its suggestions, its scale and its rigour and its hope.  What is perhaps more important is that any one of us, anyone at all can play their part in its promotion and – beyond the scope of wider goals of lobbying, whose only real limit is that of the imagination – it can be a very simple thing; as simple as writing a letter.

If enough MPs are contacted these next few months by sufficient numbers of voters it would stand in good stead not only the prospects of the passage of the Bill later this Autumn but also those of the domestic environmental agenda in general as we move forward to the New Year and the prospect of an eventual election.

It may seem a thin hope at times that any of this can address the true scale of the problem.  But it may be enough, just in time.  What is clear is that, when faced with the prospect of looking future children in the eye, when all that may need to be done may be still, if just about, within our grasp, there is no decision at all; just the surrender to effort, in the knowledge that we may stand a little more resolute, that we may win a little time for the next pearl to drop into our hands, the next sweet opportunity, in the hope our mutual lights may be seen across a diminishing void, that others may still find their way ahead.

Culls, Cows and Carbon

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

It could never be anything other than emotive. The culls that have resumed this autumn are expected to wipe out between 930 and 1800 badgers, though last year’s culls fell far short of their target, which only undermined their already highly dubious prospects of effectiveness. It’s pitted farmers against pro-badger campaigners and there’s no getting round the fact that TB is huge problem for dairy producers with some 26,000 cattle affected in 2013 alone. However you look at it, it’s an appalling situation and one which is only exacerbated by the very real emotional distress from both sides concerned with animal welfare.

It has been said that culling badgers will have no meaningful effect on TB in cattle, where new badgers will move into culled territory thereby only spreading the disease. But even if every badger in the country was killed, it’s been estimated that this would reduce bovine TB by only 16%. An independent panel appointed by DEFRA last year concluded the culls were neither effective or humane. But perhaps the most telling remark came from Natural England’s Chief Scientific advisor when he said that they have been “an epic failure”.

Prospective vaccines for TB in cattle are complicated by the inability to differentiate between infected and immunised cattle and the implications of this on exports. There are echoes here of the foot and mouth epidemic where mass culling took place as the viable vaccine would have affected overseas trade. The subsequent mass movement of cows in restocking was a major factor in the spread of bovine TB. But vaccines alone aren’t the answer; there are very real structural problems within the dairy industry that have huge ramifactions for the ability of cows to withstand infection. It has implications not just for TB but the emphasis of our general farming itself and even for our potential to lock huge amounts of Co2 back in the soil.

One problem is the lack of genetic diversity in dairy herds, a factor which severely limits their ability to fight off infection in general and TB in particular. The use of artificial insemination to help boost milk production is key in reducing genetic variation and production of antibodies and may have been instrumental in the rise of BSE itself. And TB in humans is notorious as having thrived in communities marked with the stress of poverty – this is mirrored in modern dairy cows where milk production from the average cow has doubled in the last forty years, from 4,000 litres in 1970 to 8,000 in 2010. Modern herds are under a huge metabolic strain that can only add to their susceptibility to disease.

Another problem is that so many herds are raised on grains – a development that took root when the production of cereals soared due to the hugely increased productivity of crops in the so-called ‘green revolution’ of the ‘60’s and 70’s. Short-stemmed new varieties of high-yield wheat and rice made food scarcity of the 50’s a thing of the past. This made grain so abundant and cheap that the practice emerged of feeding half of it to livestock.

Cue cows in sheds and a huge rise in the use of energy-intensive chemical fertilisers and pesticides while more and more land is put under the plough to farm rice, wheat and maize. While few cattle are kept indoors to the extent seen in the 60’s and 70’s, it’s much healthier for both cattle and those consuming their milk or meat when cows are reared exclusively on pasture. For one thing they are free to move around, growing healthier and stronger than cows spending more time under a roof. And grain-raised beef contains more saturated fats and less of the beneficial omega-3 fats. Herb-rich pasture also contains the cancer-fighting compound CLA which is totally absent in beef fed from cereals. There is also no need for nitrate fertilizers in clover-rich pastures and no need for the tractors and harvesters and all their oil endemic in conventional crop rearing.

Far from a pie-in-the-sky picture, advocates of pasture (including Graham Harvey, author of ‘The Carbon Fields’) seek a return to mixed farming where grain production took its place alongside the use of our grassland. This after all is how it’s been done, in some shape or form, since the rise of farming itself. It carries the huge benefit that, when pasture is ploughed up, it’s full of the natural fertilizer the animals provide and can later be re-sown with grass in a timeless, self-sustaining cycle.

And there’s another very big factor in favour of pasture. All soils contain carbon as organic matter. A healthy soil can contain 10 per cent of its mass as organic matter in roughly the top thirty centimetres – about four hundred tonnes of organic matter every hectare. Continuously cultivated soils contain less than forty tonnes per hectare. A thirty-year study showed that soil under pasture was not only in a generally better state than the cultivated tests but that it increased its store of carbon by a tonne every year per hectare. In other words, soil under pasture doesn’t just lock in carbon – it can help take it out of the air.

There is the factor of methane produced by ruminant animals to be accounted for, but this is more than compensated for by the lessened emissions of pasture fed animals, together with the gains of the carbon locked in the soil. And cows fed on grains produce methane anyway, with all the extra emissions mechanised agriculture entails. Grass is apparently susceptible to drought, but a pasture with deep-rooting herbs is far more resilient in this respect than cereal crops.

If pasture is such an obvious boon, why was it ever abandoned to the extent that it was? The economy of cheap grains is one obvious answer, though with the rising cost of their production that could all change. Maintaining good pasture is also more of an art than the relatively simple mechanics involved with cereal production. But the massive industries involved with the production of grains, fertilizers and pesticides, without even getting onto modified crops, appear to still hold a huge sway.

It’s clear that the very basis of our agricultural economy has been way off kilter for quite a long time. The TB crisis and the appalling culls it has engendered are the presenting symptoms of this general malaise. Only a humane approach to cattle rearing and a return to the husbandry of mixed farming can bring any kind of lasting solution. Though the promise of pasture for the atmosphere itself ought to focus attention.

Until then the words of Richard Manning in his book on the American prairies – that most productive of pastures – are more timely than ever: “A centuries worth of work, warfare and technology replaced fifty million bison with forty-five million cattle whose meat is fattier and higher in cholesterol. One wonders what progress is for.” And when our government ignores expert advice to inflict such suffering on a protected species for no tangible gain, it’s a lot more than progress we all have to question.

Toppling King Coal

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The news pops up unmissable, if it weren’t for every other scrap of news also popping at the same time, along with reports of Ann Widdecombe being transported by a showbiz wire above the heads of an incredulous or simple nervous audience on the now worryingly ubiquitous Strictly. So, this particular bit of news says ‘anger was justified’; and this from the former NASA scientist talking about the occupation last year of a coal powered power plant in Ratcliffe-on-Soar near Nottingham by a troupe of activists aiming to shut it down for a week.

The action is a clear case-in-point of a host of issues wider than the heavy handedness of the police response; the right to protest, how this may somehow impinge on wider rights if it means it interferes with the public’s ability to watch Ann Widdecombe – and many more besides – sailing literally or metaphorically with apparent tranquility above the host of disbelieving heads. These millions of mesmerized, vaguely despairing or just bored – a number I could be in on another night – caught in the glare of a mass media that has become both slicker and strangely more popular as it gets ever more debased, suggest we will not think again about our actions even as the savage weather of a dawning century paws with renewed ferocity at the door of our collective consciousness.

And that of course is why those protests took place, why one hundred and fourteen people felt inclined to brave the vagaries of trespass and the response that was bound to come with it. We’re all of us only too aware of the wolf down the road, of the carbon ratcheting up as we hurtle down the motorway of ambivalence towards a fate we all try not to think about. Really, it is not indifference but a kind of collective terror at the situation that we’re in that makes the retreat to the semi fantasy of Saturday night TV seem all the more appealing.

So many now will not join up the dots. The more pronounced the arguments become, the greater the need to take stock of our situation then the greater the temptation not to engage, to turn the other cheek, to ignore the growing feeling that one day soon we will not be able to ignore the rising tides or signs of climatic instability. It is here now, with us, this is the perfect storm, Northern Europe freezes while in Canada and elsewhere the temperature is well above the norm.

But somehow, for the most part, it does not seem so bad. So long as we are warm and have enough to eat we discover our capacity to be content. Sitting virtually incarcerated in cars on the immobilised motorways a thousand motorists turn up the radio and keep their fingers crossed. The more fortunate of us curl up in our living rooms as ice locks us all in and scour our DVD’s and anything else that will help to pass the time and really all of this is only natural; to make the best of any situation. But we seem at times strangely reluctant to not let ourselves really appreciate the nature of our situation, we do not feel inclined to count the cruel tally of the coal as the carbon stacks up from the stacks that churn it out. And partly this is understandable as to do so is to walk along the edge of a kind of precipice looking out over our future, one that does not reassure, an apparently perilous path that could lead us all too easily down a scree or more sudden slope towards despair.

The actions of those at Nottingham in 2009 were of those who chose not to look away, who sought to raise awareness that here, in Britain in the Twentyfirst Century we are rolling on quite happily with the burning of a fuel that is the major cause, besides the oil we use in cars, of anthropocentric driven climate change. Whether we continue to use coal in anything like historic quantities sets up the expectancy or otherwise for any other country in the world to follow in our wake, or set off on another, far more hopeful path.

Of course, it is not enough to beat our chests and sing out; “let there be no more burning of coal.” We have to take stock of the truly huge scale of the problem, of how much we are reliant of this source of fuel, of how comparably unreliable alternative sources of energy can be when providing the necessary base load capacity to enable sixty one million viewers to turn on their kettles in the breaks between Ann’s airbourne debuts on the box. The answers are there but they require both political will and appropriate investment.

In the recent court case, it was argued that seeking to engage the public by encouraging the use of less power on certain days would have been a more constructive response. But, as James Hansen argued, we need to leave the stuff in the ground, not merely moderate our use of it. In that sense taking on a government policy where coal is all but mandatory looks alot more credulous.

Speaking on a debate on Radio Four recently, George Monbiot defined a crucial element of justification of any protest as one of accountability, of surrendering yourself to the full force of the law if you are to break it, in the belief that your actions will be tried in a court, that the rightness of your cause will meet the rigors of the legal system and have the chance to be vindicated in the process. As I understand it, the protestors at Ratcliffe were planning to lock on en masse; in this, they had made the decision to have their beliefs put to just such a test and in the process to present themselves as accountable for their deeds.

However much such protests may make us uncomfortable, they remain, at their best, a simple articulation of an article of a clarified awareness. Whether or not shutting down power stations is the best way to go about it, even an action like this can serve to remind us that things are wrong, that we cannot afford to sit by in denial or complacency while we betray the future through the failure to acknowledge that there must be change, that whatever the complexity, whatever psychological mires we may face, we are at a turning point and must look for and continue to express our expectations that we can moderate our impact on this earth, that we remain – to a possibly still crucial degree – the masters of our destiny if we can only see it.