Everyone’s talking about Brexit. Some about the French riots. But no one’s talking about why they are happening, and what they really mean. They might think they are, but they are usually missing the point.

This article was first published at Insurge Intelligence. 

On 6 May 2010, the Conservative Party took the reins of power for the first time since 1992, propped up with some help from the Liberal Democrats. Hours before the election result, I warned in a blog post that whichever government was elected, it would be the first step in a dramatic shift toward the far-right that would likely sweep across the Western world within ten years:

Party-political collapse

“The new government, beholden to conventional wisdom, will be unable or unwilling to get to grips with the root structural causes of the current convergence of crises facing this country, and the world,” I wrote, describing the failure of all three political parties to understand why the heyday of economic growth was unlikely to return.

“This suggests that in 5–10 years, the entire mainstream party-political system in this country, and many Western countries, will be completely discredited as crises continue to escalate while mainstream policy solutions serve largely to contribute to them, not ameliorate them.

“The collapse of the mainstream party-political system across the liberal democratic heartlands could pave the way for the increasing legitimization of far-right politics by the end of this decade…”

My prediction was astonishingly prescient. The global shift to the far-right began within exactly five years of my forecast, and has continued to accelerate before the decade is even out.

In 2014, far-right parties won 172 seats in the European Union elections — just under a quarter of all seats in the European Parliament. In 2015, David Cameron was re-elected as Prime Minister with a parliamentary majority, a victory attributed in part to his promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.

Shift to the right

Unbeknownst to many, the Tories had quietly established wide-ranging links with many of the same far-right parties that were now capturing seats in the EU.

The following year in June, the ‘Brexit’ referendum shocked the world with its result: a majority vote to leave the EU.

Six months later, billionaire real estate guru Donald Trump shocked the world again when he became president of the world’s most powerful country. Like the Conservatives in the UK, the Republicans too had forged trans-Atlantic connections with European parties and movements of the extreme-right. Since then, far-right parties have made continued electoral gains across Europe in Italy, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Hungary.

We are on the cusp of a tidal wave, that looks poised to accelerate into a tsunami. Exactly as I had anticipated, far-right politics is no longer the province of the fringe, but is becoming increasingly normalised.

This not an accident. It is the result of a system that is failing — and the efforts of a network of far-right groups to exploit the fractures emerging from this system-failure to tear everything down, and erect a new order of their own fashioning.

System failure

My prediction of the resurgence of the far-right was based on analysing the probable consequences of a long-term ‘system-failure’ in which we are unable to return to the levels of economic growth we had become accustomed to in the heyday of the 1980s and 90s.

That system-failure, I explained, is rooted in the economics of the energy production that enables economic growth:

“A full and lasting recovery … is likely to be impossible in the constraints of the current system, because we’re running short on the physical basis of the last few decades of exponential (and fluctuating) ‘growth’ — and that is cheap, easily available hydrocarbon energies, primarily oil, gas and coal.

“The turning point has arrived, and without that global cheap energy source in abundant supply, we cannot continue growing, no matter what we do. Something has to give. Our economies need to be fundamentally, structurally, transformed.

“We need to transition to a new, clean, renewable energy system on which to base our economies. We need to transform the way money is created, so that it’s not linked to the systematic generation of debt. We need to transform our banking system on the same grounds. Whitehall, and the three political parties, recognize only facets of the picture, but they don’t see it as a whole.”

Turning point

The energy turning point is unequivocal. In the years preceding the historic Brexit referendum, and the marked resurgence of nationalist, populist and far-right movements across Europe, the entire continent has faced a quietly brewing energy crisis.

Europe is now a ‘post-peak oil’ continent. Currently, every single major oil producer in Western Europe is in decline.

According to data from BP’s 2018 Statistical Review of Energy, Western European oil production peaked between 1996 and 2002. Since then, production had declined while net imports have gradually increased.

In a two-part study published in 2016 and 2017 in the Springer journal, BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, Michael Dittmar, Senior Scientist at the ETH Zurich Institute for Particle Physics and CERN, developed a new empirical model of oil production and consumption.

The study provides perhaps one of the most empirically-robust models of oil production and consumption to date, but its forecast was sobering.

Sobering assessment 

Noting that oil exports from Russia and former Soviet Union countries are set to decline, Dittmar found that Western Europe will find it difficult to replace these lost exports. As a result, “total consumption in Western Europe is predicted to be about 20 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 2015.”

The only region of the world where production will be stable for the next 15 to 20 years is the OPEC Middle East. Everywhere else, concludes Dittmar, production will decline by around 3 to 5 percent a year after 2020. And in some regions, this decline has already started.

Not everyone agrees that a steep decline in Russia’s oil production is imminent. Last year, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies argued that Russian production could probably continue to grow out to at least 2020. How long it would last thereafter was unclear.

On the other hand, the Russian government’s own energy experts are worried. In September 2018, Russia’s energy minister Alexander Novak warned that Russia’s oil production might peak within three years due to mounting production costs and taxes.

In the ensuing two decades, Russia could lose almost half its current capacity. This sobering assessment is still broadly consistent with the Oxford study.

Abject dependence 

The following month, Dr Kent Moor of the Energy Capital Research Group, who has advised 27 governments around the world including the US and Russia, argued that Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its prize Western Siberia basin.

Moor cited internal Russian Ministry of Energy reports from 2016 warning of a “Western Siberia rapid decline curve amounting to a loss of some 8.5 percent in volume by 2022. Some of this is already underway.”

Although Russia is actively pursuing alternative strategies, wrote Moor, these are all “inordinately expensive”, and might produce only temporary results.

It’s not that the oil is running out. The oil is there in abundance — more than enough to fry the planet several times over. The challenge is that we are relying less on cheap crude oil and more on expensive, dirtier and unconventional fossil fuels. Energetically, this stuff is more challenging to get out and less potent after extraction than crude.

The bottom line is that as Europe’s domestic oil supplies slowly dwindle, there is no meaningful strategy to wean ourselves off abject dependence on Russia; the post-carbon transition is consistently too little, too late; and the impact on Europe’s economies — if business-as-usual continues — will continue to unravel the politics of the union.

While very few are talking about Europe’s slow-burn energy crisis, the reality is that as Europe’s own fossil fuel resources are inexorably declining, and as producers continue to face oil price volatility amidst persistently higher costs of production, Europe’s economy will suffer.

Economic growth 

In September, I reported exclusively on the findings of an expert report commissioned by the scientific group working on the forthcoming UN’s Sustainability Report.

The report underscored that cheap energy flows are the lifeblood of economic growth: and that as we shift into an era of declining resource quality, we are likely to continue seeing slow, weak if not declining economic growth.

This is happening at a global scale. EROI is already beginning to approach levels seen in the nineteenth century — demonstrating how constrained global economic growth might be due to declining net energy returns to society.

Britain, which is due to leave the European Union on 29th March 2019, is a poster boy for this brewing energy-economic crisis.

In January 2017, the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy run by the University of Leeds and London School of Economics, produced a startling analysis of Britain’s declining net energy problem. The study attempted to develop a methodology to examine national-level figures for Energy Return on Investment (EROI) — the amount of energy one uses to extract a particular quantity of energy.

Economics of energy

The goal of the study was to pinpoint the EROI value as much as possible using Britain as a prime case-study. The concept of EROI fleshes out the recognition that a significant surplus of energy is required to fuel economic activity, separate to energy that is consumed precisely to extract energy in the first place.

The less energy we use to get new energy out, the more energy we have left to invest in the wider goods and services of economic activity. But if we keep using more energy just to get energy out, the amount of net energy we have left to fuel our economies decreases.

According to the study authors, Lina Brand-Correa, Paul Brockway, Claire Carter, Tim Foxon, Anne Owen and Peter Taylor:

“The higher the EROI of an energy supply technology, the more ‘valuable’ it is in terms of producing (economically) useful energy output. In other words, a higher EROI allows for more net energy to be available to the economy, which is valuable in the sense that all economic activity relies on energy use to a greater or lesser extent.”

The verdict on the UK predicament is stark. They find that “the UK as a whole has had a declining EROI in the first decade of the 21st century, going from 9.6 in 2000 to 6.2 in 2012 … These initial results show that more and more energy is having to be used in the extraction of energy itself rather than by the UK’s economy or society.”

Trans-national structures

Citing the work of French economists Florian Fizaine and Vincent Court, which estimates a minimal societal EROI of 11 for continuous economic growth, the paper concludes that “the UK is below that benchmark.”

In other words, early last year, a major scientific study found that for the last two decades and beyond, Britain’s economic growth is fundamentally constrained by domestic net energy decline. But this groundbreaking news did not make the ‘news’.

At the close of 2010, in my book A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, I predicted that large trans-national state structures like the European Union are likely to face challenges to their territorial integrity as a side-effect of these processes.

The failure to address the systemic causes behind the 2008 financial crash, the incapacity to recognise it as a symptom of a system in decline, would lead to an increasingly authoritarian politics.

The integrity of large trans-national structures depends on the abundance of cheap energy flows to sustain them. If those flows come at greater cost and lower quality, then those structures will become increasingly strained and potentially even begin to break down.

Costs to keep the system going increase while returns are squeezed, meaning that the surplus to invest in core social goods to maintain such structures declines.

‘Surface-symptoms’

That is why despite the so-called ‘recovery’ — tepid as it is and based on accelerating debt levels (in biophysical terms borrowing from the Earth today with promise of paying it back tomorrow with what has already been over consumed today) — in real terms, peoples’ purchasing power continues to decline.

The failure to understand and engage with the root, systemic causes of the crisis also means that policymakers put themselves in a position where they can only address surface-symptoms.

All too often, that means short-term, reactionary responses. And so in France, instead of addressing the question of how to galvanise a third industrial revolution to speed a post-carbon transition and infrastructure revival, Macron’s response to the climate crisis was to protect fossil fuel and nuclear producers while hiking up fuel taxes.

He didn’t want to tackle the horrendous supply chains of big French corporations. He didn’t want to penalise the powerful oil, gas and nuclear lobbies that he hopes might help him get re-elected, and did next to nothing to speed a viable post-carbon transition that might transform economic prosperity on more sustainable foundations.

And so by placing the burden almost exclusively on French workers and consumers, Macron triggered the spiral of rage and riots. Protestors have set fire to banks, smashed and looted shops, and even targeted the Arc de Triomphe. They demand an end to corporate freeloading, along with nationalist demands such as ‘Frexit’, France’s departure from the EU, and preventing migration.

Failing systems

It is telling that while some demands are compelling, there is no semblance of understanding the real planetary crisis beyond banal tropes about Big Banks.

The French state has responded with its own violence, firing water cannons and tear gas on protestors, arresting over a thousand people, and threatening to bring in the French Army.

This is a microcosm of what can happen when states and peoples both fail to understand the deeper dynamics of a failing system: everyone responds to what is in front of them. Protestors blame Macron. The French state cracks down on violence. Politics becomes militarised, while scepticism of the liberal incumbency across the political spectrum finds vindication.

France’s riots therefore did not come out of the blue. They are part and parcel of a wider process of slow-burn EROI decline in which the returns to society from economic activity are being increasingly constrained by the higher energetic costs of that activity and productivity declines of the ageing centralised industrial-era infrastructure and technology.

It was only a matter of time before the average person began to feel the impact of that squeeze in their day to day lives. Macron’s tax hikes were not the cause, but the trigger. They lit the match, but the tinder box was already fuming.

Brexit

But we’ve been here before, in Syria and beyond.

Brexit was triggered in the context of global system dynamics which remain poorly understood. Over the decade preceding the 2008 financial crisis, Britain’s economic growth was being undermined not merely by a debt-bubble in the housing markets, but by an ailing fossil fuel dependent energy system.

That ailing system was indelibly linked to the European migrant crisis, which saw over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa seeking sanctuary across Europe, including the UK and France, that fuelled the surge in nationalist populism sweeping across the continent.

The migrant crisis, too, did not come out of the blue, but followed hot on the heels of the turbulence of the Arab Spring. The destabilisation of Syria, Egypt, Yemen and beyond was a long time coming — but it was triggered by a perfect storm of crises.

Domestic oil production declines which pulled the rug out from beneath oil-export dependent state revenues conspired with global oil price spikes thanks to the plateauing in world production of cheap conventional oil. A string of climate crises across the world’s major food basket regions led to crop failures and droughts which boosted food price spikes.

Escalating brutality

Global systemic crisis interacted with the breakdown in local national systems. As I’d reported in 2013, a natural drought cycle in Syria was massively worsened due to climate change, devastating agriculture and driving hundreds of thousands of Sunni farmers into Alawite-dominated coastal cities.

As Syrian oil revenues plummeted, its domestic conventional oil production having peaked in the mid-1990s, the government’s slashing of critical fuel and food subsidies just as prices were spiking globally was the last straw. People could not even afford bread, so they hit the streets.

Bashar al-Assad responded with escalating brutality, including shooting civilians in the streets. When protestors picked up arms in response, the cycle of violence kicked in. Outside powers intervened to coopt their favoured sides, Russia and Iran backing Assad, the West backing various rebel groups — neither particularly interested in supporting Syrian civil society. The conflict escalated, devastating the country, and fuelling an unprecedented refugee crisis.

When NATO intervened in Libya, when the US and UK backed Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Yemen, it only destabilised the region further.

The arc of collapse across the Middle East and North Africa resulted from a fatal combination: an earth system crisis, compounded by short-sighted and self-serving responses from human systems.

System crisis

When families and children began turning up in their droves on European shores, the earth system crisis ‘out there’ came home.

The West could not shield itself from the long-range consequences of the unsustainability of the very postwar system it had nurtured since the Second World War: structural dependence on fossil fuels, a patchwork of alliances with regional despotic regimes, laying the groundwork for converging climate change, crude oil depletion and the resulting domino effect of food and economic crises.

The earth system crisis that erupted in Syria triggered a wave of human system destabilisation of which Brexit was merely the first eruption.

And so the Syria crisis is indeed a taste of things to come. Europe is already a post-peak oil continent, whose domestic fossil resources are in decline. Most credible studies of Europe’s shale gas potential show that it is extremely weak and not similar to the American situation. If we are hell-bent on maintaining dependence on fossil fuels, we will be forced to import.

But as I showed in my scientific monograph for Springer Energy Briefs, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (2017), if demand growth increases at current rates, it is unlikely that Central Asian and Russian suppliers will be capable of meeting that demand at costs we can cope with in coming decades.

Climate impacts

Meanwhile, certain climate impacts are already locked in. Between 2030 and 2045, large parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are likely to become increasingly uninhabitable due to climate change.

This is the same period in which oil production across the MENA region has been forecast to begin plateauing and declining. As the energy costs of fossil fuel production and imports increases, and as the EU is likely hit again by the challenge of large-scale migration from the Middle East due to climate devastation, the challenges to the EU’s territorial integrity will not go away.

Brexit is merely a ripple on the surface of deeper currents. It is a symptom of the great civilisational phase-shift to life after fossil fuels.

In this sense, the Brexit fiasco is an example of how distant we are as a species from the conversations we need to be having. Talking about being in or out of Europe and in what way is not unimportant, but it’s also a massive distraction from the deeper systemic crisis that is unfolding beneath the very issues driving our immediate concerns about Brexit.

Earth system disruption does not inevitably result in destabilisation of human systems. But if human systems refuse to engage and adapt to those disruptions, then they will be destabilised. As long as Britain, Europe and their citizens continue to obsess myopically on the symptoms rather than the causes, we will be incapable of responding meaningfully to those causes. Instead, we will fight with each other manically about the symptoms, while the ground beneath our feet continues to unravel.

Civilizational transition

The crisis of Brexit and the eruption of the riots in France are symptoms of a great unfolding civilizational transition, in which an old reductionist paradigm of materialist self-maximation is dying.

Citizens and policymakers, activists and business leaders, need to wake up to what is actually happening to have the conversations that can kick-start meaningful approaches to systemic transformation.

This is not a far-flung crisis that is going to happen years in the future. This is now. This is happening and it is affecting you, your children, and those you love the most. And it will affect their children, and their children.

This is your legacy. This is your choice. This is your chance to engage with and become an agent of a new paradigm, one that speaks for all humans, all species, and the Earth itself.

Maybe we don’t know exactly what the emerging paradigms will look like. But we know that it’s time to ask ourselves: where do we stand? With the old, or with the new?

This Author 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist and the founding editor of INSURGE intelligence. Nafeez is also a widely-published and cited interdisciplinary academic applying complex systems analysis to ecological and political violence. He is a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute.

This article was first published at Insurge Intelligence.

Malawi School Permaculture Clubs (MSPC) was started in 2015 and proved to be an instant success with the teachers and pupils in rural northern Malawi. 

It was designed specifically to give interested teachers the information, skills and basic resources they need to change their own circumstances with some, but very little, outside help.  It encourages people to look and learn from their differing unique positions and share these experiences and resources back into the wider group.  

The majority of the population in Malawi are subsistence farmers who are at the mercy of the yearly weather and changing climate and this access to relevant skills as well as the continuation of older practices can increase their resilience in an unpredictable world.

Cultivating awareness

The recent report by the UN IPCC declared that we now have twelve years in which to avoid catastrophic effects brought about by climate change.  At the same time the WWF reported that we have lost 60 percent of the planets diversity since 1970. 

The environment is once again back at the top of the news, but for how long and – most importantly – will this lead to the big changes we need to see from Government and individuals if the worst effects are to be avoided?

Those of us interested in environmental issues find that they have never really fallen from the agenda.  Seminal works in the 1970s – such as Racheal Carson’s Silent Spring and Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful – started to document the effect that humans, and in particular industrialisation, were increasingly having on the planet.  

In the 1980s we heard about the hole in the ozone layer and I remember as a child switching to pump action hairspray because of it. We seemed to be learning. 

Growth trajectory

Forty years on though, very little has changed and in too many areas the Government has failed to lead the way and even dragged its feet with issues related to the environment.  

Painstakingly slow reforms over recycling aren’t the answer unless we also tackle the amount of waste we are producing, as we see by the recent highlighting of the plastic problem. 

Increase in the efficiency of cars is no good if the numbers on the road constantly increase. Advances in renewable energy matter less when we are constantly increasing the amount of power we use.  Water saving techniques are almost pointless if we continue to increase the uses of water, as development does.   

Worldwide, certain countries might make the changes but the whole world is on a steady growth trajectory with very little seemingly able to change it.  It was once stated that if everyone used the same resources as an average European, we would need seven planets to sustain the population. As of writing, we haven’t found these yet.

The recent NASA report on the hole in the ozone layer shows it is shrinking again and highlights that changes in behaviour do bring about positive results.  So why has there been this lack of proper action by Governments when, as we see, action can result in changes.  It definitely seems to be business as usual, especially with the election of Trump in America and Brexit this side of the Atlantic.  

Corporate takeover

In a world in which we rely on our government to make the right decisions, we could end up in a very vulnerable position.  

The UN report stated that wholesale changes are needed to our life and social systems if we are to prevent the worst effects of climate change.   Yet this is somehow cited as a reason it’s not happening.  But how can we ignore it, when we need to preserve the life systems of the earth that we depend on?  

The recently formed protest group Extinction Rebellion have called for the start of a mass civil disobedience campaign in response to the governments’ inability or reluctance to act in the face of the environmental crisis.  They state that they are forced to act by the governments’ lack of action and the lack of any other legal option available to challenge the status quo, which ultimately threatens the planet.

Naomi Klein states in her recent book No is Not Enough that there has been a corporate takeover of governments and the real control is now with business.  Indeed many of the largest corporations have bigger incomes than many countries and the relaxed financial rules since the 1980 allow them to evade laws more easily.   

She also stresses that it is not only important to understand the powers that  these politics serve, but also to offer a different path and a way forward;  to support and guide those people who are willing to pursue an alternative vision.   

Finding solutions

I finished my degree in Development Studies and first heard about permaculture while volunteering at The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) in the nineties. 

A specific definition of permaculture can be quite difficult to articulate. Bill Mollison argues that the overall aim of permaculture design is to produce an efficient low-maintenance productive integration of plants, animals, structures & man. 

This discovery changed the direction of my life and instead of focussing on the political, I decided to focus more on the solutions.  The environment became central to my life and I felt that it was becoming an increasingly difficult space in Europe to effect real change.

There was a greening of business and language which made everyone feel they were getting involved, yet very little really changed.  While it is possible to opt for an alternative path, by choosing to live outside societal norms, it is very hard work, and the options are limited.  

After always having a passion for Africa I left for Malawi in 2001, initially volunteering at Lukwe permaculture camp.  As soon as I arrived in the country I felt that it had the potential of sustainability and there was already quite an established permaculture scene.  

Great potential 

Malawi clearly had problems and still does. It is one of the poorest countries in the world.  It also has massive potential in terms of diversity of environment, water, social networks, and the population’s access to the land.  

Malawi has definitely been disadvantaged and its people vulnerable because of their harsh environment, poor communication, transport and lack of government support. But these conditions also mean that now, when real changes are needed, they can be at the forefront.  

In a world in which governments are unable to affect the change we need, a lack of government control could be beneficial. There is the potential to bypass the two hundred years of industrial development and be in a much more sustainable situation than in the so-called advanced West.  

In Malawi, systems are already decentralised and people have access to land and resources. The improvement of telecommunications allows better access to relevant knowledge, information, markets and skills that are relevant for people to change their own situation.  

Organic growth 

After many years working on environmental and information community projects through my small charity Butterfly Space, Kate Swatridge and I started MSPC.  

It is based around an after school permaculture club for up to forty children during which the teachers cover topics like compost, deforestation, nutrition and seed saving.  It aims to empower teachers – providing transferrable skills, knowledge and basic supplies that can help them to improve their own health, livelihood and opportunities.   

In these remote parts of the country that often have very little input from outside, MSPC has proved immensely popular. 

The specific intention was to offer a transferrable model that allowed interested teachers to opt in to the programme and receive training, teaching materials, resources and support throughout the year in order for them to run a successful programme. This self-selection of the schools has been central to its success.  

Mkondezi Primary School held the first open day in March 2016, three more schools expressed interest meaning 4 schools followed the programme in the second year.  All schools hold open days which means it is growing organically.

Moses Yakota, teacher at Chinguluwe Primary School, said: “I really love the permaculture work, it teaches us the skills we need to look after ourselves, and not be so reliant on the Government for jobs”.

Environmental regeneration

Subsequent years saw five and six schools sign up so that this year we are working with fifteen government schools in Nkhata Bay District.  

In 2018 we were winners of the Lush Spring Prize for social and environmental regeneration which has allowed us to fund this expansion.

The schools are increasingly remote, with many inaccessible during the rainy season.  We are developing their resources and links with others in their cluster so that will enable them to be less dependent on us over time.  

There has been interest from further afield, in Malawi and worldwide, and we are currently piloting the programme with five remote schools.  We will learn how we can best make it widely available on many platforms.

Worldwide, it is clear the environment is still under pressure, that changes taken so far are insufficient and that we really do need to challenge the economic systems that underpin society.  The current politics seems to hinder that rather than lead the way, the government are increasingly unable or unwilling to act.  

We need individuals and organisations to take things into their own hands, to work on solutions that inspire and protect humans and the environment, and to provide populations the world over with the tools they need to adapt to and reduce climate change.

You can visit the christmas gift shop for Malawi schools permaculture club here. 

This Author 

Josie Redmonds studied Development Studies at Swansea University.  Volunteering at  CAT inspired her to leave for Malawi in 2001. Butterfly Space (R´d Charity No 1148162) was established with Alice Leaper in 2007, working on several community projects. MSPC was started in 2015 with Kate Swatridge.

In the wake of the COP24 negotiations it is easy to forget that a much less publicised event will be taking place in just a matter of days, although it is one of equal significance to the global environment.

On 19 December, the Malagasy people go to the polls to vote for their choice of one of two remaining candidates in the second round of their presidential election.

Madagascar is home to an extraordinary abundance of biodiversity, a unique and precious assemblage of flora and fauna. The island is nearly twice the size of the British Isles, but with about ten times as many species of organisms. 

Significant deforestation 

Perhaps as much as three percent of the world’s species are found in Madagascar, with more than 95 percent of them found nowhere else.  Overall, only five to ten percent of Madagascar’s species has been catalogued by science, although we have found most of the vertebrate animals and plants by now. 

Out of necessity, Madagascar’s rural poor are consuming their natural resources directly as much as the people of any other country on earth.  On top of that, illegal logging for export has become a major problem in the relatively small forests that have survived.

Wood from the several species of rosewood that occur on the island has been particularly sought after.  Its deep red wood is prized and most of the accessible trees in Asia have already been harvested.  This wood fetches very high prices globally, and especially in China.

Industrial-scale activities such as lumbering and mining are rapidly destroying most of the natural areas left on the island and the biodiversity that live in them. 

These combined forces will continue to destroy the environment unless alternatives are found for the people.  All 111 species of lemurs are unique Madagascar. As a result of the activities outlined above, almost every one is on the brink of extinction, making them the most endangered group of primates on Earth.

Comparisons with Brazil 

Local law enforcement already faces a near insurmountable battle against the global appetite for rosewood. 

If former president and current candidate Andry Rajoelina returns to power on 19 December, their job will become essentially impossible. Under his tenure from 2009-2014, illicit exports of wood from the island soared. After coming to power on the back of a military coup, one of his first acts was to tear up legal protections against felling certain hardwoods, thereby enriching himself and a cabal of timber barons.

Comparisons have been drawn to Brazil’s President-elect Bolsonaro, who has pledged to do away with similar environmental protections to make way for mining and industrial-scale farming.

And yet, while it is being lost rapidly, most of the original Brazilian rainforest is still in place. In contrast, approximately 90 percent of Madagascar’s vegetation has been destroyed over the centuries. 

Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average share of GDP of about US $1500, about a tenth of the average in Brazil.  Madagascar’s current population of about 26 million people is estimated to be on its way to doubling within the next 30 years (by 2050). In short, the situation there is even more urgent, if nowhere near as widely known.  

Environmental sustainability 

The world needs to learn to care enough about Madagascar’s people to help them attain environmental sustainability, but we seem to be a very long way from that goal. 

Recent years have seen a spate of new world leaders gleefully setting the global environmental agenda back by decades. 

Madagascar – a biological treasure-house of great significance – has relatively few resources left to exploit. With another Bolsonaro as President, it is the Malagasy people who will suffer most of all. But if they lose, so do we all.

This Author

Dr Peter H. Raven is a renowned botanist and environmentalist. He is president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

The American writer Wallace Stegner crafted his heartfelt ‘Wilderness Letter’ to the US Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission in early December 1960.

Stegner argued that the value of wilderness should not be quantified merely by the extent of its economic riches or even the scale of its recreational potential, but should stand for something much more fundamental to us as humans; to give us perspective on our place in a changing world. 

He finished his letter by writing:  “We simply need wild country available to us even if we never do more than drive to its edges and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Dramatic landscapes

I have been pondering his words as I write a response to the Government’s Review of Designated Landscapes – our National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs).  

It’s not quite the wilderness that Stegner was describing, I know, but the sentiment is much the same: how well are we balancing the need for wild places with the pursuit of economic growth and our own wellbeing?  

There are ten National Parks and 34 AONBs in England (one straddles the border with Wales), forming a meandering patchwork across the country.  Our National Parks make up around 9.3 percent of the land area, but are home to less than 1 percent of the 55 million people in England.  

They are dramatic landscapes, often described as “jewels in the crown”, and wild if not truly wilderness.  

Alongside these, our AONBs cover some 15 percent of the English countryside and coast, and represent quintessential, rural landscapes – the Constable country of Dedham Vale, the rolling Cotswolds, or the Blue Remembered Hills of Shropshire – selected for their essential beauty and tranquillity.

These designations came out of the ground-breaking 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, the post-war legislation that was being conceived during the darkest days of the twentieth century.  

Aspirational landscapes

While I think they have stood the test of time pretty well, my concern is more about whether in our desire to protect the best we have lost sight of the rest.  After all, there are still large swathes of the country that don’t enjoy any designations at all, but offer real potential as they change from their industrial past into something new.

The National Forest is one such place in the heart of lowland England.  You could never call it a wilderness, but it shows how an industrial landscape can be rapidly transformed without the need for any formal designation.  

Through tree planting, the area has seen a quiet revolution, with the natural world returning within a generation.  It is this creation of new wild landscapes which seems to me to be today’s real ‘geography of hope’.

In the same way that we have cleaned up our waterways, I wonder what could be achieved if we focused more on transforming our post-industrial landscapes that circle our major towns and cities – our coalfields, chemical wastelands or mineral sites?  

Maybe we can create new aspirational landscapes that are better placed to absorb growth, and can do so in a way that enables people and nature to co-exist.  Otherwise these places will grow in a way that, as Stegner observes, will be “committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.”   

Post-industrial innovation

We have tried for some years to find a way of meeting this ambition.  Some of these areas have been supported as landscape partnership schemes, others identified as community forests or even selected as regional parks, but I would argue that we don’t yet have a coherent framework to support landscapes that are still evolving.  

I don’t think we necessarily need a new formal designation – the National Forest has shown that – but we do need vision, political backing and support.  

Where our existing landscape designations might look back, these post-industrial areas can look forward; where National Parks and AONB’s tend to restrict development, these areas can use development to promote the best of technology and innovation; where designations have a more pre-determined outcome, non-designated landscapes can be more flexible in the face of change.  

So, let’s not just focus on those landscapes that have intrinsic beauty, but think about the potential of the less beautiful too.  They might just surprise us.  Indeed, some of our National Parks were sites of heavy industry several hundred years ago.

The Review of Designated Landscapes will report in 2019, marking the seventieth anniversary of the legislation being passed. My response cannot compete with Stegner’s gifted prose, but I am with him in spirit. In these crowded isles, whether it is existing areas of natural beauty or newly created landscapes, our wild country reconnects us with what it means to be human and we should value that as both primal and priceless.    

Today is the final day that you can input to the review. 

This Author

John Everitt is a British environmentalist who has spent more than 25 years in nature conservation. He is the chief executive of the National Forest Company, responsible for coordinating the creation and management of the 200 square mile National Forest in the Midlands, UK. Stay updated by following @NatForestCo.

The American writer Wallace Stegner crafted his heartfelt ‘Wilderness Letter’ to the US Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission in early December 1960.

Stegner argued that the value of wilderness should not be quantified merely by the extent of its economic riches or even the scale of its recreational potential, but should stand for something much more fundamental to us as humans; to give us perspective on our place in a changing world. 

He finished his letter by writing:  “We simply need wild country available to us even if we never do more than drive to its edges and look in.  For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Dramatic landscapes

I have been pondering his words as I write a response to the Government’s Review of Designated Landscapes – our National Parks and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs).  

It’s not quite the wilderness that Stegner was describing, I know, but the sentiment is much the same: how well are we balancing the need for wild places with the pursuit of economic growth and our own wellbeing?  

There are ten National Parks and 34 AONBs in England (one straddles the border with Wales), forming a meandering patchwork across the country.  Our National Parks make up around 9.3 percent of the land area, but are home to less than 1 percent of the 55 million people in England.  

They are dramatic landscapes, often described as “jewels in the crown”, and wild if not truly wilderness.  

Alongside these, our AONBs cover some 15 percent of the English countryside and coast, and represent quintessential, rural landscapes – the Constable country of Dedham Vale, the rolling Cotswolds, or the Blue Remembered Hills of Shropshire – selected for their essential beauty and tranquillity.

These designations came out of the ground-breaking 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, the post-war legislation that was being conceived during the darkest days of the twentieth century.  

Aspirational landscapes

While I think they have stood the test of time pretty well, my concern is more about whether in our desire to protect the best we have lost sight of the rest.  After all, there are still large swathes of the country that don’t enjoy any designations at all, but offer real potential as they change from their industrial past into something new.

The National Forest is one such place in the heart of lowland England.  You could never call it a wilderness, but it shows how an industrial landscape can be rapidly transformed without the need for any formal designation.  

Through tree planting, the area has seen a quiet revolution, with the natural world returning within a generation.  It is this creation of new wild landscapes which seems to me to be today’s real ‘geography of hope’.

In the same way that we have cleaned up our waterways, I wonder what could be achieved if we focused more on transforming our post-industrial landscapes that circle our major towns and cities – our coalfields, chemical wastelands or mineral sites?  

Maybe we can create new aspirational landscapes that are better placed to absorb growth, and can do so in a way that enables people and nature to co-exist.  Otherwise these places will grow in a way that, as Stegner observes, will be “committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment.”   

Post-industrial innovation

We have tried for some years to find a way of meeting this ambition.  Some of these areas have been supported as landscape partnership schemes, others identified as community forests or even selected as regional parks, but I would argue that we don’t yet have a coherent framework to support landscapes that are still evolving.  

I don’t think we necessarily need a new formal designation – the National Forest has shown that – but we do need vision, political backing and support.  

Where our existing landscape designations might look back, these post-industrial areas can look forward; where National Parks and AONB’s tend to restrict development, these areas can use development to promote the best of technology and innovation; where designations have a more pre-determined outcome, non-designated landscapes can be more flexible in the face of change.  

So, let’s not just focus on those landscapes that have intrinsic beauty, but think about the potential of the less beautiful too.  They might just surprise us.  Indeed, some of our National Parks were sites of heavy industry several hundred years ago.

The Review of Designated Landscapes will report in 2019, marking the seventieth anniversary of the legislation being passed. My response cannot compete with Stegner’s gifted prose, but I am with him in spirit. In these crowded isles, whether it is existing areas of natural beauty or newly created landscapes, our wild country reconnects us with what it means to be human and we should value that as both primal and priceless.    

Today is the final day that you can input to the review. 

This Author

John Everitt is a British environmentalist who has spent more than 25 years in nature conservation. He is the chief executive of the National Forest Company, responsible for coordinating the creation and management of the 200 square mile National Forest in the Midlands, UK. Stay updated by following @NatForestCo.

Extinction is a crime against all time. We must understand what is happening to us at this crucial stage in human evolution. At this stage in the evolution of consciousness itself on Earth. 

With technology, we have developed massive power that can be used for better or for worse. However, our consciousness, and our conscience – what the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire called “conscientisation” – has not kept pace with invention. 

This has left us utterly exposed to the blandishments of marketing. Exposed to what might be thought of as “Microsoft security vulnerabilities” within the human psyche. 

Wants and needs

Throughout the twentieth century, the corporate marketeers have exploited the tools of wartime propaganda. They have combined them with insights taken from depth psychology – insights from the likes of Freud, Jung and Adler. Insights that were intended to heal the suffering of the human soul, not to capitalise on it. 

They have used these to hook into our deepest hopes, fears, and desire itself. For a century now, we have been subjected to advanced motivational manipulation.

As such, consumerism did not just happen. It has been wilfully created. Consumerism, more than levels of population, is the cutting edge of human impact on the planet. I define consumerism as consumption in excess of what is needed for a dignified sufficiency of life. 

Marketing – setting up the idols of its false gods – has replaced the legitimate satisfaction of human needs with a devilish creation of unnecessary wants. Why can’t we “get no satisfaction”? Because we have been hoodwinked into replacing true satisfiers with false satisfiers. These always let us down. 

But here’s the nub, the painful bit. Too often, we ourselves are complicit in the hoodwinking. We’re addicts, who keep on living in the hope that the next fix will be the fix-all.

Psychological work 

Whenever we slip into being self-centred we’re complicit. Whenever we avoid the inner work that is needed to become more centred selves. The spiritual work, or call it if you prefer, the depth psychological work.

And so, we see, our extractive and extinction-rendering economy is driven by both these inner factors that come from ourselves, and outer factors imposed by others and by the emergent properties of the systems within which we live. 

What can be the antidote? How can we delegitimise such systems and thereby drain them of their hold upon us? We must dig from where we stand, wake up, be “woke”. 

Individually and collectively, we need to ask ourselves the fundamental question: “Does it give life?” Does a given course of action, or a particular consumer product, give life? Or detract from it, and thereby, lead towards extinction? 

It’s hard to talk about these things. Interestingly hard! But I believe we must throw off our embarrassment about love. 

Bearing witness 

We need to start talking more, learning and teaching one another how to be great lovers in these times. Lovers of one another. Lovers of life itself. Lovers of the paths of being, doing and experiencing that give life. 

We must be humble. We are all complicit in the state of the planet, albeit some much more than others. 

The word, “protest”, comes from the Latin,pro-testari. It means to testify for, something. To bear witness. To be Extinction Rebellion.

This, then, becomes a joyous call – a basic call to consciousness; a call to live this life as not just any old life, not just as any piece of shit to be kicked around and to kick around. But to live this life abundantly.  To be great lovers.

This Author 

Alastair McIntosh is the author of books including Soil and Soul (on land reform), Hell and High Water (on climate change and consumerism), Spiritual Activism (on doing social change) and Poacher’s Pilgrimage (on war and the inner life).

Misael Luis Soccora is a leader of a Wayúu community, in La Guajira, Colombia. The Wayúu are an indigenous community whose ancestral lands have been carved up by Cerrejón, a vast opencast coal mine that has devastated local communities.

Today Misael finds himself in Newcastle, UK, telling an audience of environmental activists about the forced displacement, coal dust pollution, and death threats that he and his people suffer as a consequence of the mine.

He then gives the floor over to his ‘companero’ Aldo Amaya. Aldo enlarges an image of the Cerrejón mine, its crater dwarfing the dinosaur-like machines within it. He points to the biggest one: ‘This is the machine I operate.’

In solidarity

Misael and Aldo seem like unlikely allies at first. Aldo, his voice rough with decades of coal dust, explains: ‘When mining first came to the region in the 1990s, we were so keen for the jobs, we didn’t pay any attention to the effects of the mine.

“We were young and uneducated. We built the strength of our union and won many victories for the workers. We know that the company takes advantage in order to make more profit whenever it can. In time we became conscious of how they were making communities and the ecology suffer.’

On a visit to North East England with the Coal Action Network this October, the pair are accompanied by Rosa Maria Mateus Parra from CAJAR, a lawyers’ collective in Colombia.

Rosa explains that the community activists and the Colombian mineworkers’ union Sintracarbon, of whom Aldo is the General Secretary, have been officially working in solidarity for over a year to stop the expansion of Cerrejón.

This is a mine so enormous that you can still make out its grey smear if you zoom out to view the whole of Colombia on google earth.

Neo-colonialism

The lawyers’ collective works to expose the wrongdoing of the mining company in a region in which the Colombian state are at best absent and at worst complicit with the mining company’s misdeeds.

The two regions represented in the room, Northern Colombia and the North East of England, share a common history and a common present.

When coal mining was violently withdrawn from the UK’s North Eastern coalfields in the 1980s and 1990s, it was violently imposed onto Northern Colombia with the support of paramilitaries.

What manifested as class struggle in the UK manifested as neo-colonialism in Colombia, as multinational companies centralised ownership of coal extraction by appropriating land.

During the 1984-85 miners’ strike and every year since there has been a significant percentage of coal imported to the UK from La Guajira.

Phase out

At times this was as much as 30 percent of the UK’s coal use, to compensate for the closure of the deep pit mines, which used to support entire communities and local economies, many of which are still in recovery today.

What remains in both locations is privatised, opencast coal extraction, where the land is opened up to extract coal in vast quantities using explosives and heavy machinery.

On a brisk morning, Misael, Aldo and Rosa walk together around the UK’s newest opencast coal mine, ‘Bradley’, in the Pont Valley, County Durham, with some of the residents who held off the project for over 30 years until it finally opened in June 2018.

The community are now fighting to get the mine closed. The site is a fraction of the size of Cerrejón. Nonetheless, Misael surveys the terrain with a heavy gaze; the beginnings of the coalworkings eating into the diverse green landscape amidst a backdrop of villages and rolling countryside.

‘Opencast mining is bad wherever it takes place. It’s like a monster which grows and grows’, says Misael. Indeed, Banks Group are seeking to open two other open-casts in the North East, undeterred by the UK’s ‘coal phase out’.

Spiritual displacement

I ask Misael if he is surprised by how close people’s homes are to the mine. ‘No. I am surprised by how close the mine is to people’s homes’, he replies.

In La Guajira, the train line which takes the coal to the port to be exported to the UK, Europe and elsewhere, has sliced Misael’s community in two. Heavy coal trains pass by his village 24 hours a day, spewing coal dust and creating all but ceaseless noise.

Misael explains what this does to the ‘spiritual health’ of the people there. ‘As a people, we are dreamers,’ he says.

‘We dream every night and our dreams guide us in our waking life. But because of the noise at night we cannot sleep deeply, so we cannot dream deeply.’

As a consequence, the Wayúu are in an increasing state of ‘spiritual displacement’, in addition to being physically displaced and threatened.

Routinely deny

Shortly before he left for the UK, a death threat directed at Misael was posted in public places around a village he was passing through. For this reason he chose not to have his photograph appear in this article.

Coal mining companies operating in the UK are eager to point out the human rights abuses in Colombia in order to justify fossil fuel extraction in the UK instead.

But Misael and Aldo appear deeply troubled by what they see in Pont Valley. ‘I have never seen a mine this close to homes’, says Aldo, who is keen to share with the Pont Valley residents his insider knowledge of coal workings.

He explains that the risks to their homes and their health is worse than Banks Group claim. Homes near to opencast mines can fall apart due to underground subsidence caused by blasting away the earth to get to the coal, something which coal companies routinely deny.

‘They lie.’ Misael adds, ‘It doesn’t matter where you are in the world; mining companies lie. They don’t know what it does to communities. Only communities can know that.’

Health and safety

Banks Group argue that jobs brought by the mine will benefit the community. Aldo squints through the binoculars at the rumbling machines pitching black dust into the crisp air, ‘This is a small team. A very small team’.

The UK’s opencast mines are operated by a tiny workforce. Around 130 people work in opencast mining, despite providing around 30% of the coal burned in UK coal-fired power stations.

The Bradley opencast supports 20-30 jobs. The privatisation of the coal industry is now widely acknowledged to have been a deliberate attempt to crush power of the unions as part of a neoliberal agenda – fewer workers, more machines, more profit and less trouble.

Aldo’s union Sintracarbon, by contrast, is at the top of it’s game. Their achievements in less than three decades against three of the world’s biggest mining companies are impressive (Cerrejón is owned by BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Glencore).

These range from improved working hours and health and safety standards, to scholarships for children of coal workers so they can seek a new industry after the closure of the mine, which is set at 2034.

Active solidarity

With a strong presence throughout the supply chain, Sintracarbon possesses the formidable power to shut down Colombia’s coal exports from pit to port.

Aldo seems very much at ease with their position against the expansion of the mine, despite the fact that it supports his members’ jobs. He knows that coal mining is not forever, even though it may well have a longer life in Colombia than in the UK.

The alliance between Sintracarbon and the Wayúu is proof that it is possible for an industrial union to hold a meaningful pro-workers agenda, as well as standing against the expansion of the fossil fuel industry that they are part of.

It also holds a lesson for the climate movement in the UK; the more power the union movement has, the more confidently it can take a position against fossil fuel extraction.

To be able to do this, UK union struggles need active solidarity from all sectors of civil society. In the UK’s ‘coal phase-out’ plans there is no comprehensive vision for workers at the end of coal.

End to coal

It’s time for those of us who want to see an end to fossil fuels to take our cue from Misael and Aldo, to seek justice from coal companies for both workers and communities.

Isobel Tarr is a campaigner with the Coal Action Network, a grassroots campaigning organisation which works to end open-cast coal mining and burning coal for electricity in the UK.

Coal Action Network works in solidarity with communities affected by open-cast coal mining and pollution, both in the UK and internationally, towards a just end to coal now.

This Author

Anne Harris is an activist with the Coal Action Network. Read about and donate to the Pont Valley residents’ ongoing legal battles to stop Banks Groups’ opencast coal projects in the North East of England, online. To learn more about battles against Cerrejon in Colombia visit this website.

The commercial space company, Moon Express, has announced that it was setting up Moon Express Canada in order “to leverage Canadian space science and technology in the exploration of the Moon and its resources”.

What surprised me about this revelation was that Moon Express Canada is apparently planning to mine the moon with its partner companies on board.

Micro and nano space technology company Canadensys Aerospace Corporation, geological imaging company Gedex, LiDar systems developer Teledyne Optech, and mining technologies and robotics company Deltion Innovations, which has been outspoken about making Canada a leader in space mining.

Rights violation 

As I read the reports, I shook my head wondering how Canadian mining companies have been permitted to amass so much damage to the earth and human rights, much less now being enlisted to destroy the moon.

Canada is no stranger to ecological destruction in its mining practices, within the country and also in Latin America. The Mexican Network of Mining Affected People (REMA in Spanish) has been outspoken in recent years over the problems of Canadian mining on indigenous lands.

It has also criticised the use of the Canadian diplomatic corps to negotiate deals between Canadian mining companies and local leaders who violate the rights of the people to property, safe environment, open consultations with public consent, lawfulness and legal security.

One company which has effected enormous damage on Mexican land is Goldcorp, which has broken national laws in purchasing collectively owned property in Carrizalillo, Guerrero and in Mazapil, Zacatecas.

The encroachment of Canadian mining companies in Mexico today shows them operating 65 percent of the mining projects around the country, amounting to 850 mining projects at various stages of development from exploration through to construction and extraction.

Manipulate and abuse

These mining projects have resulted in serious health issues, environmental contamination and destruction, the criminalisation of social protest, as well as the use of threats, harassment, smear campaigns, surveillance, arbitrary detentions and the assassination of political leaders and activists who speak out against these mines. 

Mariano Abarca was murdered after he opposed a Canadian mine in Chiapas where he was detained in 2009. In 2014 in Guerrero, Mexico, 43 students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teacher Training College in Ayotzinapa, disappeared with no trace of their whereabouts, except for the remains of 19-year-old Alexander Mora Venancio.  

Many believe that the recent and nearby inauguration of Torex Gold’s El Limón-Guajes gold mine in Cocula, Guerrero is related to these students’ disappearance and murder, given that a mine manager had already been murdered, workers kidnapped, and communities protesting over broken promises, contaminated water, and health problems.

Similarly the Honduran leader, Beta Cáceres, was murdered in her home on 3 March 2016 after recent protests against the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam in Río Blanco and various schemes to grab land from the people against which Cáceres was fully mobilised.

It is common to find these companies levelling criminal charges at the protestors – including sabotage, terrorism, rebellion, conspiracy, and incitement to commit crime.

Open-pit mine

Because of the money these companies attract to the local economy, their power within the community is tremendous – and this includes their ability to manipulate and abuse the local laws and collaborate with organised criminals.

In addition to human rights violation, there is grave ecological and biological damage produced by these Canadian mining  companies.

For instance, there is strong evidence of serious health impacts in Carrizallillo, Guerrero which was presented at the International People’s Health Tribunal in 2012 in connection with Goldcorp’s Los Filos mine, one of the largest gold mines in the world.

These impacts  included, but were not limited to, a high incidence of eye, skin, respiratory, and gastrointestinal problems, as well as a significant increase in premature births and malformations in newborns – and that’s just the shortlist.

Mining within Canada is no less controversial. It was recently announced that Gahcho Kué, an open-pit mine, is expected to produce between 6.6 million and 6.9 million carats of diamonds in 2019, and each year thereafter through the end of 2021. 

Disastrous effects

Gahcho Kué is one of the world’s largest new diamond mines which opened in September 2016 on a remote mine site on the Canadian tundra just on the edge of the Arctic Circle, and is jointly operated by De Beers and Mountain Province Diamonds.

While diamond mining is not Canada’s primary industry, Canada is the fifth largest diamond producer in the world and the ecological damage produced by diamond mining are well known.

Uranium levels in nearby Kennady Lake are expected to increase by a factor of 11,000 during the mine’s operation due to acid mine drainage which causes damage to the ecosystem.

Other common problems associated with diamond mining include erosion, formation of sinkholes, loss of biodiversity, and the contamination of soil, groundwater, and surface water by chemicals from mining processes.

Badly executed diamond mining has caused serious problems ranging from soil erosion, deforestation, and the forced migration of local populations. There are also many cases of diamond miners having re-routed rivers and constructed dams to expose riverbeds for mining, all with disastrous effects on fish and wildlife.

Consuming less

Just over the last few weeks, we have seen Canadian mining companies continue their expansion into Western Australia,  India, Papua New Guinea, the Republic of Guinea, and into Yukon and Nunavut.

While there seems to be little that individuals can do to stop these powerful companies, we need to address that the common denominator between mining and humans is our consumption.

With this knowledge in mind, it is imperative that we push back against mining, conduct a mental inventory of what we purchase and consume, and that we ask ourselves which objects which do we absolutely need to live and which items can we live without.

In the absence of an ecological revolution, the future of our planet depends on our ability to consume less. 

This Author 

Julian Vigo is an independent scholar, filmmaker and activist who specialises in anthropology, technology, and political philosophy. Her latest book is Earthquake in Haiti: The Pornography of Poverty and the Politics of Development (2015). You can follow her on Twitter at @lubelluledotcom. 

Ella Daish started the campaign to ‘Make all Menstrual Products Plastic Free’ in February this year. Her petition has received an overwhelming response, with over 106,000 signatures to date.

Ella, a postal worker, became aware of just how many problems there are surrounding menstruation through the fantastic campaigning of inspiring individuals and groups working in this field. 

These issues range from the taboo that keeps people from talking about periods, to the environmental impacts of the plastic in our period care, to period poverty.

Period poverty

Period poverty has a huge impact. According to Plan UK, one in ten girls between the ages of 14 and 21 cannot afford menstrual products and a shocking 137,000 have missed school because of this. Period poverty also affects those who are homeless, refugees and simply those that cannot afford sanitary products.

It saddened Ella that in 2018 there are so many individuals out there who do not have access to these essentials – she wanted to address this by taking action.

After seeing reverse advent calendars last year in aid of food banks, Ella felt compelled to set up a similar project in aid of period poverty. That is why this year, rather than giving gifts to family and friends for Christmas, Ella is putting an eco-friendly item into her Eco Period Box each day throughout December. The box will then be donated to a period poverty charity at the start of the New Year.

Ella is an individual doing this and would love it if as many people as possible would support Eco Period Action for Good this December by joining in and taking positive action. 

You can join in by donating an item, sharing the Eco Period Box video, setting up a box at work or at home, encouraging others to get involved and by sharing what you are doing on social media using the hashtag #ecoperiodbox!

Get involved

Eco Period Box started on 1 December and ends on December 31st. 

You can get eco-period products from local health food shops and supermarkets. If your time is limited then there are multiple online stores that you can buy from and get your order sent directly to your chosen charity by using their address in the delivery details. 

You can donate to period poverty charities like the Red Box Project, Bloody Good Period, Freedom 4 Girls and local food banks such as the Trussell Trust.

Anything you do or donate is truly appreciated, remember to post your donation pictures on social media using the #ecoperiodbox to help spread the word and encourage others to get involved!

For more information check out Ella’s blog post here, and follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for regular updates.

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a commissioning editor for The Ecologist.

Some banks have already begun making changes to their fossil fuel financing – but overwhelmingly their action is too little and too slow.

Banks must exclude all fossil fuels from their corporate and project financing quickly and responsibly. Right now, though, positive change to energy policy is incremental, falling short of the systemic shifts necessary to avoid climate breakdown.

Some banks undertake periodic reviews of their policies. HSBC do this yearly. Others are less regular. However, campaigners on both sides of the argument can speed up this process by forcing a policy revision sooner than planned that could either weaken – as in the case of Suncor shunning HSBC over their tar sands exclusion – or strengthen the bank’s position on fossil fuels – as in the case of People and Planet’s intervention at Barclays’ AGM this year, which worried Standard Chartered enough to rush out a policy excluding some project finance for tar sands and the Arctic before their own AGM.

The review process might involve the bank’s Environmental and Social Risk team reaching out to stakeholders, including campaigning NGOs, for input. Sometimes NGOs get advanced warning of policies’ content. Ultimately, though, final decisions lie higher up the bank and they have no formal accountability to campaigners.

Banks’ decision-makers responsible for shaping policy on fossil fuel finance are accountable to the Board of Directors who are in turn usually accountable to shareholders – those investing in the bank. Even this is contingent on the culture of the bank, however.

Piecemeal exclusions

One key obstacle to campaigners asking banks to make ambitious improvements to their energy policies is where banks look to for guidance.

Many base their fossil fuel finance strategies on the scenarios and projections of the International Energy Agency, which consistently falls short of offering a pathway for staying below 1.5oC and projects continued future demand for oil and gas.

Banks also take cues from Governments in their major markets. If Governments want more fossil fuel infrastructure, despite the need to triple efforts to cut emissions even below just 2oC, then banks will often follow suit. Just one example of this is French bank Societe Generale’s continued support as financial advisor for the Trans Adriatic Pipeline across Europe, despite popular opposition.

Under this process, no bank has been bold enough to exclude all financing for a whole sector of the fossil fuel industry, let alone exclude all fossil fuel finance. Instead, we have seen a mishmash of piecemeal policy commitments from various banks.

In this, it is clear that there is no overall strategy for systematically reducing financing to the fossil fuel industry from any specific bank, let alone across the sector.

Offshore oil

They might exclude specific projects with a bad reputation, but continue to finance the companies responsible for them. They might exclude projects based on efficiency standards or geography, or only for extraction projects, but not for transportation infrastructure that makes the extraction worthwhile, such as with tar sands.

Too often, this piecemeal exclusions are used to bolster the bank’s green image while it continues to finance the majority of the rest of the fossil fuel industry.

One example is Barclays’ recent coal policy where they shifted from having ‘no appetite’ for direct finance for new coal power plants in developing countries to including the expansion of existing coal plants in developing countries. Tiny steps, incommensurate with the scale and urgency of the climate crisis.

Similarly ING’s policy excludes finance for Arctic offshore oil exploration but not for extraction and transportation, onshore oil or Arctic gas.

Societe Generale only exclude offshore oil but allow onshore oil and all gas. These nuances are especially important given the strong possibility of oil and gas development beginning soon in the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Banks must not finance this expansion.

What do they need to do?

Banks must ensure their exclusions of financing different fossil fuels form part of a comprehensive strategy to exit the entire fossil fuel industry.

The industry must be conceived holistically including exploration, extraction and transportation.

The recent IPCC Special Report on 1.5 degrees stated that emissions must be net zero by 2050, which means that the use of fossil fuels must be phased out sooner than 2050. Banks must aim to end their finance to the industry well within the next three decades.

How should they do it?

In practice, excluding the fossil fuel industry cannot mean banks should immediately cut loose every fossil fuel client. A just transition will ensure support for workers and communities dependent on the fossil fuel industry, and this must be planned, not haphazard, with banks playing their role. An exit from fossil fuel finance requires two steps, as demanded by a new global campaign, Fossil Banks, No Thanks!

STEP 1: Given how close we are to triggering climate breakdown, there are no excuses left for financing new fossil fuel projects. A just transition does not require it – in fact, it will undermine this transition by creating new dependencies on fossil fuel infrastructure in places that could otherwise have developed renewable energy capacity.

Nor can the climate cope with any new infrastructure. So banks should immediately end all direct finance for fossil fuel projects as a first step, and refuse to finance clients planning new fossil fuel projects.

STEP 2: Next, banks should publish clear plans to phase out financing for the rest of their fossil fuel clients. This can mean giving those clients deadlines, compatible with holding warming to 1.5 degrees, by which they must have fully withdrawn from operations involving the extraction, burning, or transportation of fossil fuels, or else the financial relationship will end.

For coal, this must happen sooner than for oil and gas, but oil and gas must also be rapidly phased out. It can also mean cutting ties with clients that show no willingness to change their business model to become compliant with the goals of the Paris Agreement.

These authors

Chris Saltmarsh is Co-Director: Climate Change Campaigns for People & Planet. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh. Claire Hamlett is Climate Campaigner at BankTrack.