environment

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.

Over the Tarmac: the Spring

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

If you had to a state a point where the government bid a final farewell to any green credentials, it arguably came with the budgetary autumn review way back in 2011. The 45 road schemes laid out back then have been augmented since by another 150 so that now we seem to be facing a road building programme on a par with the ‘Roads to Prosperity’ schemes of the early nineteen nineties. Those schemes characterised in so many ways the last Conservative government just as the protests against them were symptomatic of wider dissent.

Of the roads planned today, 42 are pretty much direct revivals of those proposed in the ‘nineties and form part of a picture comprised of 76 bypasses, 48 link roads, 12 ring roads with another 60 more minor projects. The whole programme is being estimated at costing around £30 billion. If the figures for the roads built in the previous decade and a half are anything to go by, we can expect a fairly substantial overrun of these early financial projections.

Taken together the roads would affect National Parks, the Norfolk Broads, Areas of Outstanding National Beauty and several World Heritage Sites. They also of course represent a dramatic sea change in transport policy from on high with aspirations to curb car use and promote public transport looking more than a little forlorn. And with road transport emissions accounting for well in advance of twenty percent of UK carbon emissions, the policy effectively scuppers one of the more malleable means by which we can effectively rein these in.

It’s more than a little ironic that vast amounts of cash are being pumped into new infrastructure at a time of austerity so caustic that the upkeep of existing roads is being jeopardized. As a means of funding new roads, the government are looking at schemes such as public-private partnership deals whereby future taxpayers are often lumped with the ‘hidden tolls’ for roads under construction today. But there is still a huge immediate pricetag being picked up by central and local government.

But resistance to all this is growing, most notably with the groups affiliated with the Campaign For Better Transport’s ‘Roads to Nowhere’ campaign. And particularly vigorous protests have been taking place at Combe Haven Valley in opposition to the Bexhill to Hastings Link Road. Earmarked by the DfT themselves as “one of the worst value for money schemes in Britain,” the road’s route has been the scene of incredible acts of front and tenacity as trees have been occupied, camps set up, the less than proverbial bulldozers stopped in their tracks and work effectively delayed for many weeks.

At the time of writing, the DfT have not yet confirmed they will fund their allotted share of the scheme – some £56 million out of a total already spiraling above the £100 million mark. East Sussex County Council are forecast to spend a projected £70 million on the road at a time when it is making wider cuts of the same amount that stand to leave adult social care and children’s services particularly badly hit.

Somehow though, to see the camps spring up, to witness the energy of those making a stand and the sense of release in the process, there seems more in the air than simply a fight against old-school and deviant infrastructure. To go to Combe Haven and see the people in the oaks, to see and hear the pristine valley in the last few days before it’s due to be severed in two, the struggle seems iconic of so many other situations in the wider world. At a time of unprecedented ecological loss, the fact that here in the UK we are losing our ancient woodland at a rate even faster than that impacting the Amazon, any attacks on existing woodland should be more widely recognised for the carnage they really are. And at a time when the government seems deposed to outdo all previous levels of contempt they seem to hold large segments of the population in, there’s something that feels particularly fitting in people staking a common claim in the ground that’s due for destruction and stating enough is enough.

The gruelling conditions on site at Hasting over the previous few months are testament that none of this is necessarily easy. But the rewards for those engaged are clearly evident to see, even in the grip of bitter winter; the knowledge that when people act together there’s a very firm hope for turning round situations that might otherwise prove intractable. But just as the protests of the nineties took years to reach their final culmination, Hastings is just the first major manifestation of the kind of outcry that needs to be taken up more widely if the hydra-like heads of these hundreds of schemes stand any chance of being properly defeated.

This article originally appeared in the spring issue of the Transition Free Press.

Ancient Woodland, Modern Minds

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

So we live in a world where existence for so many species we happen to share this planet with is in jeopardy, or has already been denied. And here at home our ancient woodland – supporting at least twice the amount of rare or threatened species than any other UK habitat – is being wiped out at a rate faster than that in evidence in the Amazon itself. So here at least, in knowing this, we’re given something like a greater clarity, that if we can get beyond the myth that the world was made solely for our benefit we surely have a duty to protect those whose lives rest in our hands, in our ability and willingness to speak and act on their behalf.

So where do we start in such a monumental mission? There are the obvious candidates of course – the HS2 line that threatens twenty one ancient woodlands for a scheme whose money would be better spent on improving and maintaining our existing railway tracks and which, if built, would scar a wider Chilterns landscape that has so far through accident or luck escaped too much encroachment by the infrastructural outrider that so often heralds more and more development. The protests against this particular project seem set to run and run.

Then we have the sorry story down in Kent of Oaken Woods – 81.5 acres of ancient woodland due to be swept aside for a ragstone quarry, a decision which goes against not only the county council’s minerals plan but also policy of central government towards ancient woodland. And there are no shortage of other threats – road widening programmes, pylons, new houses, even oil extraction.

There is no doubt these woods need all our help and that campaigning in all its forms is now as necessary as ever. But perhaps the greatest threat to our old woodlands – and everything else – is simply the mentality that lets us think that their removal is ok, that they and the species they support are somehow secondary to our own human concerns. They are not, in our common culture, in any sense inviolable. They are, or so the logic goes, the pretty chattels that adorn a landscape loved by sentimentalists and precious few besides. There is simply no room for such pleasant irrelevancies if we want a modern and functioning nation. So the roads are ushered in, high speed lines are laid out as some kind of sleek and greener future and the end justifies any means because industry and commerce must win out, because these are the wheels that keep our world turning even when such cogs drive our own end as much as the scraps of habitat that happen to be in the way.

We can fight any number of projects and – where they threaten precious ecosystems, protected by laws that are routinely deemed fit to be overridden – it is right that people should do so. But if we are serious about preserving them for good, if we are serious about somehow grappling with the underlying assumptions, attitudes, beliefs and even that most unmodern of mindsets: the stories we tell ourselves, we have to see more clearly the ancient change in attitude – what you might even call the original sin – that let us think this world was ours to do with as we please. Without the shift in perspective such insight would hopefully bring, we will ultimately still be simply pushing at revolving doors, or banging our heads against walls. If we do not change the state of mind that underpins each push then even immediate success in any campaign will be rendered temporary because the beast would still live that breathes life into yet another threat and then another.

A long time ago there was no need to sweep aside the plants and animals that did not appear to matter to our immediate concerns. The day such acts became permissible was perhaps the inception for the sorry times we face today. The more we can all recognise that and struggle to imagine a way beyond it is perhaps the greatest and most important challenge we face. Until then nature will remain apparently expendable as will our own lifelines that she carries, a reminder if one was still needed that there is no boundary between us and the world around us except that which we have created in our minds. Demolishing that arbitrary and hitherto all too powerful border has never been more urgent or more vital.

Landmatters

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

Whatever you think about flying, picture yourself for just a minute as one of the masses on a flight towards Heathrow from Dublin or Cork. The destinations and points of departure are arbitrary, as is the thought of the flight, other than the fact that it would allow you to look down on the countless sea of green of Ireland and Wales and the English West while further east vast swathes of urbanized acres stretch out almost sentient paws towards what went before. It might give you some sense – a vague and distant one, a sense that was cushioned and somehow unreal but nonetheless still lent you some greater perspective – of how we sit now in these few raw days of sunlit early spring.

As flowers come up there is a mounting sense of disbelief or just foreboding as the effects of looming cuts and those of a so far faltering economy come a little closer every day. But there is consolation still to be had in the sun, the green fields are lit up and those who work upon the land may count themselves as blessed. The paths that now may not be so well maintained still beckon, the hills still stand; memorials to everything that can endure, speak of bedrock despite a world that sometimes seems precarious.

Life goes on and here, for now, that means the same old story of concrete and of tarmac in a counterpoint to everything that has been handed down; the old sad shires and network of a hundred thousands fields and woods; the timeless things, the things that once perhaps we thought would last forever. These two worlds seem set against each other; the former logical if not quite ruthless, conforming to a rational that people must be housed, those houses must have power and an ever growing infrastructure needs to keep the whole thing somehow ticking over. In opposition then: the greenery, the things we all still cherish seem both fundamental and almost anachronistic, a never never world that cannot last against the march of everything that’s modern.

This narrative is ridiculous of course, however much traction it has; we depend upon all that is green for our future, as surely as we all need heat and shelter and have every right to expect the two with a reasonable degree of comfort. But their opposition, the dichotomy that says it must be one above the other is at best born of a failure of imagination. The voices that suggest it can be another way seem relatively muted; we largely do not hear the ideas of low impact life, of living with as light a footprint as possible, in homes other than those formed by four brick walls. Those who may aspire to this find themselves set against a planning infrastructure geared towards the more conventional, that does not distinguish between the poles that separate these two contrasting forms of housing.

It almost seems a form of institutionalized insanity; that those who seek to pioneer a way of life that surely offers us so much can be kept back at every turn. But perhaps the times are shifting after all. Last summer, the Landmatters permaculture cooperative in Devon were successful in their bid for the extended planning permission that will allow their enterprise to carry on. A small ecovillage of perhaps half a dozen benders, yurts and the occasional barn, they run dozens of courses every year, manage woodland, rear livestock as well as provide a model of life and of another kind of agriculture. The cooperative has been accepted as part of the LAND project; a network of demonstration permaculture sites set up by the Permaculture Association of Britain. The place represents a microcosm of a pattern of living that could be rolled out on a much grander scale, or which could perhaps be simply replicated in many more places throughout the country – it offers a very different vision of the future than the shards of glass and steel going up in central London.

Landmatter’s success with their planning permission could not be more timely, with central government now looking at a new national planning framework. Perhaps this could be the beginning of a process that will allow greater leeway for those who choose to live as simply as they can, in the knowledge that this is far from the restriction it may sound like – it represents a liberation from the myriad distractions we associate with what we call modern life, it offers a much greater connection to the outer world and so with life itself where it does not come transmitted through the prism of a sometimes out-of-kilter media. Those who have tasted it know how rich such a lifestyle can be – so that the environmental benefits come almost as an aside, or are so deeply embedded in the essence of the whole experience that separating motivation and the result becomes an almost artificial exercise.

The dynamic that we need to decouple ourselves from – as individuals as well as a society – can never be an either or; four brick walls cannot represent an outright denial of everything with value, just as life in a yurt will always be a choice and never anything more mandatory. But those who choose to live outside the literal box and who seek to keep to a minimum their dependence on the host of related consumer services that often accompany more mainstream lifestyles have much to teach us all. They can serve to set the way ahead, can remind us all what life can look like, can help us navigate towards somekind of tenable and even decent future.

A greater shift to simpler living gives us as a culture other options, makes our collective position in an ever changing world all the more robust. Far from representing any kind of step back, low impact living at its best is a form of refinement that frees up both time and energy. It’s surely time we began in greater numbers to take on board the lessons it provides.

There is no ‘Away’ in ‘Throwaway’

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

You can see it towering up like a kind of colossal ark against the backdrop of the sea. Cranes stoop around it like some kind of gang of gangling ministers. It is already now a living symbol of failure of vision, or something more complicit. Soon a fleet of lorries will transport daily more than 500 tonnes of waste to be burnt up in Newhaven’s new incinerator. The ash produced and the toxins it contains – whether caught in the filters or the bottom ash that constitutes around a third of that which has just been burnt – is to be deposited in ‘land raise’ sites around the county.

Here, that means that out on the flat land that runs down to the Pevensey levels, previously tranquil country lanes will be full of dumper trucks and the ash – rich among other things in heavy metals – will sit, semi airbourne, mountains in the making as a toxic realisation of what miopic local government can look like. The truly disturbing thing is that they want to use the stuff as a construction material, thereby increasing the danger of the stuff seaping into groundwater, never mind the health effect for anybody living and working in the buildings they intend to build with it.

Officials insist the risk to health is minimal, that incineration is a valuable source of power as well as a solution to the problem of our running out of landfill sites. And there is no doubt that the problem of the amount of waste produced in the UK is huge – some 434 million tonnes every year – enough to fill the Albert Hall every two hours. Some 30 million of these tonnes are produced by domestic rubbish.

But there have been great changes, not least an increase in recycling from 4% to 40% since 2000, with a target of 50% by 2020. The tragedy of the proposed move towards more incineration is that such changes are halted if not put into reverse. In fact, local authorities who’ve forked out for incinerators will be induced financially to source waste from outside their area, particularly if the incinerators are linked to providing a set amount of power. This creates the use of more trucks on the road and erodes the growing aspiration that we should be getting away from waste per se, should be encouraging more compostable products, better collection of compost itself and greater use of anaerobic digestion. Incinerators lock us in to the mentality whereby we do not think of what we throw away. The binmen do their rounds and we are all conditioned to forget.

In her recent book ‘The Secret Life of Stuff‘ – Julie Hill spells out the nature of the problems of our relationship to the stuff we consume and throw out. A large part of what we’re faced with is the effect of the ‘linear economy’ whereby we make stuff, use it, then throw it away – reintegrating any of it back into the system still takes place much less frequently. Just look at aluminium – ubiquitous because it’s so useful; light, flexible, even barely toxic when used as packaging, it is smelted in inferno-like conditions whereby a single plant can use as much electricity as a city of a million people. Transported huge distances during its manufacture we use 900,000 tonnes of the stuff in the UK every year. While around half of that used in packaging is recycled every year, that still leaves a vast amount going to waste.

Or take a look at the half a million tonnes of clothes and textiles buried in landfill each year, along with an extra half a million tonnes of carpet, 8,000 tonnes of which are laid for events lasting only hours or days. Changing our clothes and furnishings regularly irrespective of whether they still have life in them has become symptomatic of modern life – once people made patchwork quilts and rag rugs, repaired things, bought them in the expectation they would last. A hundred years ago, household rubbish mainly consisted of ash and cinders and maybe food waste if there wasn’t a dog or pig around, back in a prewar world before consumption gathered pace and where salvage was still part of the scenery.

We need to start a greater shift back to such sensibilities along with working towards solutions such as designing products for durability and for recovery of their constituent materials along with returning nutrients from food and human waste to the soil. Reforming how we reduce waste and set about its management is undoubtedly a long, hard grind and incinerators hold out the promise of a seemingly quick fix. The environmental cost of the production of the waste that they burn, to say nothing of putting elements of it back into the atmosphere shines an uncomfortable light on such a promise, or policies of here-and-now convenience.

There are now 81 incinerators planned around the country. It has been calculated they produce twice as much CO2 as fossil fuelled power stations, making the plan for more incinerators look doubly perverse. Meanwhile those living under the prevailing wind will have to deal with a legacy of increased likelihood of cancers. The extent to which dioxins produced represent a significant risk is still controversial, though their output during the start up and shutting down of the furnace has not been properly monitored in the UK. Meanwhile the filters do not catch nano particles which can infiltrate the lining of the lung and cause internal inflamation, damaging organs and even unborn children.

At Newhaven now and anywhere downwind we have to live with a leviathan that may well set the county back by decades. The building looms as a testament of how not to do things, of what can happen when councils bite the bullet of an out-of-sight-and-mind mentality that sums up our modern problem of waste production itself. The facts that the way in which the councils involved have acted here has been described by the local MP, Norman Baker, as ‘amateurish and slipshod’, that the very legality of the deal with the construction firm has been called into question are somehow depressingly unsurprising. If anything can be drawn from such a sorry story, it should be that many other places in the country still have a choice about whether to meet the future of waste management with an attitude fit for this century, not some all too easy, corporately financed non-solution that creates more problems than it claims to bring an answer to.

“Our Richest and Most Fragile Habitat”

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

At first there was the by now usual sense of stunned disbelief: the government – not content with dispatching any public body with a goal of serving the greater public good or attempting to provide some kind of environmental balance from on high – was coming for the Forestry Commission. But beyond the justified chorus of concern, the petition that has already gathered 150,000 signatories, the score of campaign groups that has sprung up, is the idea really as bad as it sounds?

After all, The Forestry Commission itself was set up after the First World War during which the importance of a domestic supply of timber had been made acutely relevant by the interfering effect of German u-boats. Our previous habit, formed in the previous century, had been to simply strip other unsuspecting countries of their wildwood. In a short space of time after the founding of the Commission in 1919, vast tracts of upland hillsides, moorlands and heaths had been planted up.

The effect on these habitats in our backyards was obviously less than brilliant but at least we weren’t denuding the pristine forests from so much of the rest of the empire. And here, even at this first inception of the Commission, there lies the rub of how we provide for our appetite of timber without undue damage to the natural environment. Is it so bad if so much of the Commission land has now come up for sale? Weren’t these trees planted to be harvested at some stage down the line? With our current deficit isn’t now as good a time as any to call in our debts? We might even stand to reclaim some of those moors and heaths and barren but beautiful hillsides that were lost beneath the blanket of dark spruce.

One very large problem with this is that large areas of ancient woodland have been cut down and grubbed up and planted with conifers this century, seen as they were after the collapse of their age-old management pattern as somehow extraneous, unproductive patches to be tidied up. About half of our ancient woodland has been lost since the end of the Second World War and replanting with conifers accounts for by far the largest share of this. At least, such a proportion would have been lost if these woodlands had not proved so unexpectedly durable – they can revive after a considerable time with the right conditions and even decades of the heavy shade of conifers have not removed them entirely.

Infact, since the 80’s there has been a growing recognition of the need to thin out conifers where they have been planted over ancient woodland and revive the latter in all its beautiful and species-enriched glory. Which is exactly what stands to make the proposed sell off so tragic – the Commission was planning to pursue such restoration on a massive scale. A vast amount of recoverable ancient woodland stands at risk of being lost, forever.

So even if the concept of selling off an asset once held firmly for the public does not raise hackles in and of itself, even if the thought of tracts of forest losing the excellent level of upkeep of paths and rides that the Commission currently provides does not sit uncomfortably then perhaps the proposed pawning of this most precious asset – the 20,000 hectares of woodland as close to wildwood as anything we are ever likely to possess might just wake us up to what we stand to lose in this proposed sell off.

The sorry star upon a proposal which has long since shed its needles and should be removed from both houses with all speed is that the mechanism drafted to facilitate the sell off is not even constitutional. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re glibly told that this is an opportunity for community groups to acquire their local woodland – even if such groups gather the money, where exactly do their members hope to find the time to manage forests with any thing like the level of dedication the Commission currently provides?

There will always be a need for sustainable forestry. But brokerages as hasty as this one appears to be, running the risk of selling off to firms who only have profits in mind and little or no sense of what husbandry can look like don’t do the country any favours by any yardstick. The Commission maintains 100% of its woodland to Forestry Stewardship standard – there will be no such requirement for future owners. To make a former point again, even the economics is dubious; the FC making sizeable returns on their estates to the point where the body costs the public only 30 pence per taxpayer per year. But this government has no sense of value, of what a thing is worth, of what generations past have held dear and fought for. They paint themselves as bitter medicine, as the cruel but kindly short sharp shock. Really though they are just libertarians, about as respecting of institutions as their far left mirror images. Whether semi-crazed by ideology, or simply guilty of an amauterish gambling in the face of the crisis we face, they seem set to discover the limits of the population’s tolerance.

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.

A Very Basic Thing

~ Jim Hindle ~ Leave a comment

The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was created in 1961 partly out of the heightened awareness of the region’s people and wildlife brought about by Laurens van der Post’s descriptions in ‘The Lost World of The Kalahari.’ Today, his name has been invoked by those very people he described – the Gana, Ghi and Tsila Bushmen – whose continued existence in that place is still very much under threat. Partly evicted in the nineties, the process was completed in 2002 as the entire population was forcibly removed to settlement camps at the edge of the park where the depression so common with people removed from their lands was compounded by alcoholism and the spread of HIV.

Restored to their territory by a ruling of the Botswana High Court in 2006, their one borehole – that was capped upon their expulsion four years previously – remains sealed and the government seem determined for this state of affairs to continue. A second court case has just taken place to assert this most basic human right of the Bushmen of access to water. The region is one of the planet’s driest and the Bushmen are having to take an arduous 300 mile trip to gather water from the nearest available source. At least one woman has died of dehydration and the conditions in general are described as harsh and dangerous. Hundreds of the tribe are languishing in the resettlement camps, too afraid to return to their ancestral lands without such a vital resource. Meanwhile numerous boreholes have been drilled for the reserve’s wildlife and a Safari Lodge within the reserve has been allowed to build a swimming pool. Many Bushmen, especially the old and young, are sufferring from lack of water. In an effort at intimidation, the government sent in truckloads of troops to the region in the run up to the court case. When it came to it, the Court reserved judgement. It is not clear when the final decision will be made. “It pains us that the animals and tourists on our land can drink our water to their heart’s content yet we go thirsty” said Jumanda Gakelebone, a Bushman in the reserve.

That Botswana’s government wants the Bushmen off the land, there can be no doubt. One very obvious reason is the diamonds found within the reserves – a further deposit of which is supposed to be under a Bushman settlement. It is perhaps convenient then that there are those who claim there can be no place for people – any people – within a wildlife reserve. Chief among such exponents is John Terbough, author of ‘Requiem for Nature’, an advocate of ‘fortress’ conservation. His feeling that “a park should be a park and it shouldn’t have any resident people in it” is echoed by Botswana’s Director of Wildlife and National Parks, Trevor Mmopelwa, who claims that allowing people to live in the reserve would “make the management of CKGR extremely difficult in that there will be two conflicting rights existing side by side.”

Is this really then a story of the contrasting needs of people and the animals they happen to share land with? Are efforts to defend the Bushmen placing human rights over that of the local wildlife? The issue has certainly been divisive but attempts to override the rights of people living on the land are at best simplistic and at worst fall victim to a mindset that is seeing indigenous people evicted from their lands across the globe at an unprecedented rate.

Their power boosted by various sponsors, no small proportion of them corporate, various big international nongovernmental conservation organisations (or BINGOs) have embarked on a huge global push to increase the number of ‘protected areas’. In 1962 there were some 1000 official such ‘PA’s’ worldwide. By 2005 there were 108,000 with more being added every day. A land mass the size of Africa itself – more than 12% of all land globally – has been ringfenced in this way.

And all too often, if these PA’s have happened to have been occupied by indigenous people, they have been moved on, either through force, through ‘soft evictions’ or the contestably phrased ‘voluntary resettlement.’ In Chad, a tenfold increase in protected land resulted in an estimated 600,000 conservation refugees during the nineties. India, the only other country even bothering to count, admitted to 1.6 million five years ago. Globally the figure could be anywhere from five to tens of millions. The figure in Africa alone may well exceed 14 million.

What should be obvious but which flies in the face of the logic of the various BINGOs is that many of the places deemed worthy of protection are so valuable precisely because of the knowledge and practices of the people living there. In Africa, where indigenous evictions from protected areas are highest, 90% of biodiversity now lies outside their boundaries. History is showing us that, for the sake of biodiversity alone, where indigenous people live in ways that are ecologically sustainable (and for that, read the vast majority), their eviction is the most counterproductive thing we can do.

Perhaps the real nub of the issue is our conception of wilderness, of the wild and our place upon it. A very real problem is our notion of nature as separate, as ‘out there’, a thing which can be visited but which sits apart from our modern lives, from the ever mounting effects of our daily actions. Tribal peoples here are seen as throwbacks, ‘archaic fantasists’ as Botswana’s President Khama has said, removed from the realities of 21st Century life, a people to be educated and absorbed.

But in reality of course they hold so much that we can learn from; often enhancing their environments through a sophisticated knowledge of biological diversity without any formal schooling in ecology, botany or zoology. The world that they inhabit holds the key to how life – far from the environmentally dystopic state of affairs most of us have grown accustomed to – can be far less intrusive on the natural world and, at its best, can approach something genuinely harmonious. How tragic then that the Bushmen and others like them should be brushed aside while we are still allowed to visit what has become a semi-artificial, pristine natural world we only ever tend to reach by jetting through the skies our planes have wounded.

The aims of international conservation are wholly noble but suffer from this trap of dual realities. Its sponsors include the World Bank as well as a host of bilateral and multilateral banks and transnational corporations. The Nature Conservancy has around 2000 corporate sponsors while Conservation International has 250 corporate ‘partners’. Often, there is a ‘debt for nature’ swap, with PAs created in return for annulment of part of that country’s national debt. So perhaps there is a kind of logic as well as more than a hint of the perverse at President Khama’s membership of Conservation International.

Perhaps, in contemplating the Kalahari, we could do worse than remember the creation of the first nature reserve ever created – Yellowstone Park – which was ‘set aside’ at the expense of the Miwok, Shosone, Lakota, Bannock, Crow, Nez Perce, Flathead and Blackfeet peoples who had all existed there benignly for so long. Laurens van der Post bought the Bushmen’s existence to a global audience and it was explicitly for their benefit – as well as that of the wildlife around them – that the Kalahari Game Reserve was created. Today the Bushmen call out to van der Post’s godson – Prince William – who is visiting the country this month. His response will perhaps indicate the kind of figureheads we can expect in the years ahead of us, it will determine whether, as a culture, we have in any way moved on from the days of evicting whole peoples whose outlook can teach us so much.

Botswana’s government’s actions are undoubtedly driven by money, by a complete disregard for both their own constitution and the basic human rights of their countrymen. At their root these actions stem perhaps from a contempt for a way of life they think we should move on from. And it is the messages we all send out, deliberately or otherwise, than help determine such perceptions. We cherish our lifestyles, the thousand little things that make them easier and often let ourselves forget our sense of what is really vital. A certain level of development undoubtedly has served us well, but perhaps we have for too long lost the very precious thing which is so vital; the sense of being part of that which lies beneath our feet. Without it we are all at sea and seek to plug the gap with things which only compound our feelings of emptiness; we are often like ghosts or children pushing at a wheel we cannot see nor understand. There has to be a greater balance, some sense of what is valid and what we need to get beyond. The Bushmen here can help to lead us back, remind us that when we live in greater harmony with the land we are all the richer for it. Don’t let us forget them and their right to such a very basic thing.