Growing food is critical to human survival but they way much of our food is now grown endangers other species, impacts our climate and even degrades the very soils we rely on to grow. 

In 2018 the Permaculture Association (Britain), James Hutton Institute, and IIASA worked with the University of Dundee to create and run a free online course to help growers, gardeners and others better understand not the challenges of food production. 

The initiative also sought to teach growers about regenerative growing practices and how to investigate the impacts or benefits of these in their own growing.

Home-grown food

Originally, the intention of the scientists behind the GROW Observatory course was to help make widely available robust and well-researched practices to regenerate soils and benefit biodiversity whilst growing food.  

However, as they investigated the scientific research and experiments conducted on topics like using cover crops, mulching and planting legumes, they discovered that almost all the research was at the scale of mechanised farms. 

Virtually none was at the scale of growing that most course participants were interested in – home gardens, own-grown, allotments and market gardens. 

A unique opportunity to extend the learning beyond the course, and the benefits beyond the participants was envisaged.  

The course expanded beyond the usual provision of topical information to teach participants how to develop research questions from their own ideas and observations and turn these into practical experiments.  

Polyculture

Participants were then invited to join in with the experiment and grow, observe, and harvest over the summer season before returning in the autumn to learn how to use and apply the results in a follow-up course.

The Great GROW Experiment invited growers to compare the productivity of three crops (beans, spinach and radish) grown together in a polyculture with those same crops each grown alone in a monoculture.  

Each participant would get an answer from their own growing, but also contribute to a collective understanding of whether or not more diverse crop plantings can be more productive with less space.  

The experiment involved quite a commitment of time and space compared to other citizen science projects where citizens tend just to provide some simple observations and the scientists use the data.  

Here, participants were supported to analyse and use their own findings.  The experimenters who joined in certainly found that it was worthwhile.  

Growing appetite 

Along the way, experimenters who started on the online course met up in real life, inspired their friends, and even went on local radio to talk about their community garden participating in an international experiment!  

Over 80 percent of those who’d never tried growing a polyculture before were already using the new technique or intended to do so.  

Many said that as a result of participating they were inspired to improve their observations and record-keeping, and were setting up experiments of their own from testing out new soil improvement methods to growing new crops in new ways.  

And the results of the experiment?  Overall, the polyculture planting was significantly more successful, with the beans doing particularly well.  However, this wasn’t the result for everyone – about 30 percent of experimenters got better yields from the monoculture plantings.  

There’s clearly more to learn and a growing appetite to take the learning out of the classrooms and into the garden.

Feeling inspired? 

The free online course “Citizen Science: Living Soils, Growing Food” runs again starting May 13th 2019.  Sign up for free unlimited access. 

The Permaculture Association is supporting a new member-led experiment comparing polycultures and monocultures – find out more and join in here. 

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement, number 690199.

This Author 

Dr Naomi van der Velden works with the Permaculture Association (Britain). 

More than 100 people have been arrested in London as police deal with ongoing climate change protests, Scotland Yard said today.

The number of people held over the Extinction Rebellion demonstrations surged overnight after a police order restricted the protesters to a site at Marble Arch.

Following disruption in the heart of the capital on Monday, groups lingered on Waterloo Bridge and Parliament Square into the early hours of Tuesday.

Emergency

Transport for London warned that some roads in Westminster and the West End remained blocked as the rush hour approached.

Police said that as of 6am there had been 113 arrests in total in connection with the demonstrations. The majority of the arrests were for breaching the order instructing protesters to stay only at Marble Arch.

Five of those arrested – three men and two women – were held on suspicion of criminal damage after protesters vandalised Shell’s headquarters on Monday. 

Campaign group Extinction Rebellion said it aimed to cause more than £6,000 damage so they can be tried by a jury in Crown Court.

Thousands of people gathered at five central London locations on Monday in a bid to bring the capital to a standstill. Thousands of people joined protests across central London to demand the government declares a climate emergency.

Unfurled banners

An Extinction Rebellion spokesperson said: “The rebels on the glass roofing [at Shell] have elected not to come down for twelve hours, forcing police into a protracted waiting game.

“During this time, the other three arrested earlier in the day have since been taken to police stations and released without charge, and have returned to find their two fellows still unarrested.

“Supportive rebels have thrown food and sleeping gear up to those on the roof – it looks like the police below have plenty of waiting still to do!”

Skateboarders replaced cars and lorries on Waterloo Bridge as the Thames crossing was closed to traffic and decorated with pot plants and trees.

Placards

Police on the bridge said there were no plans to move protesters on but indicated that the response could change if there is major disruption at rush hour.

One officer said yesterday afternoon: “It’s been very peaceful so far. Everyone has been really pleasant. The only grief we’ve had is from passing motorists shouting at them to ‘Get a job’ – that’s about as exciting as it’s got.”

A bright pink boat became the focus for hundreds of activists stopping traffic at Oxford Circus, where some used makeshift devices to lock their arms together.

Roads were also closed and drivers diverted around Marble Arch and Piccadilly Circus. At Parliament Square, people unfurled banners, held up placards and waved flags as speakers took to the stage.

Awareness

Later the Metropolitan Police imposed conditions on the protesters, restricting them to gathering in the area around Marble Arch.

London’s protests are part of a wider campaign which will see people in at least 80 cities in more than 33 countries hold similar demonstrations on environmental issues, campaigners said.

Organisers said: “The International Rebellion begins and Extinction Rebellion will be bringing London to a standstill for up to two weeks.

“They will be blocking five of the city’s busiest and most iconic locations in a non-violent, peaceful act of rebellion where they invite people to join them for several days of creative, artist-led resistance.”

Protester Olivia Evershed, 23, said: “I hope that it’s really going to bring awareness about the emergency crisis that we are in, and encourage the government to act.

Activist

“They can change a few of the laws along with the Paris agreement so that we can really work towards achieving a practical target. We’ve got 12 years to act before there is irreversible damage to the environment and we start to see catastrophic changes. If we don’t do anything to change this, our children will die.”

Laura Jordan, 52, said: “This protest stands a good chance of working because we have a vast amount of ordinary people all saying the same thing. We need to change the way we do everything, the way we use fossil fuels. But this starts with the Government.”

The movement has received support from actress and activist Dame Emma Thompson and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.

The XR spokesperson added: “At night Marble Arch was illuminated with XR projections reading ‘Act Now’, ‘Time is running out’, ‘Extinction Rebellion’ and ominous reminders of the degrees of global warming to date and tons of CO2 emitted.

“This set the stage for an evening performance by Nick Mulvey, with an estimated 300 or so rebels still holding the Arch by 8.30pm. By late evening, the roads were quiet, and, with blocks set up, rebels were confident that they would be able to hold this iconic site for the night.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article includes copy from Press Association. 

The launch of a grassroots Labour for a Green New Deal group is the latest exciting policy development to come out of the party.

It shows that the incredible range and ambition on display at The World Transformed is being put into action. The front bench is even talking the talk, with the declaration of an ‘environment and climate emergency’ heaping pressure on the Conservative government as well as Labour-held councils. It is evidence that the party is increasingly shifting away from Old Labour as much as New Labour. 

But if Labour begins to ‘get’ the environment – if it understands the extent to which our economy and society is destructive as much as it is unjust – what place is there for the Greens?

Unfair dismissal 

Once the home of “big, bold policies”, through the wilderness decades for the Labour left and during the great Green Surge, torpedoed by first-past-the-post in 2015, that refrain now sounds tired.

Labour is now driving forward the shorter working week, for example, both from its upper echelons and grassroots. Could it do the same on a Green New Deal? One of the new group’s founders thinks so, calling other progressive parties irrelevant.

For those who have fought for and stood on a platform with climate justice and a Green New Deal at its core – the Green Party manifesto – this is more than a little galling.

No doubt it’s an exciting time to be a Labour activist amid such momentum. But the dismissal is unfair and unwise.

Those part of the new charge for Labour radicalism on climate should recognise the uphill battle they face in their own party, and the value of the movement that will exist beyond it.

Heathrow expansion 

Firstly, the radicals’ own party is far from what they want it to be. Claims to ideological purity are useless, and few serious Greens would bother. But ours is a narrower church.

Labour’s ignorance and short-sightedness on climate is well-documented – from airport expansion to fossil-friendly councils – and the reason these failures are used to chastise the party so often is because if there was even a collective ounce of cognisance about the true scale and urgency of climate breakdown then they wouldn’t occur.

The Heathrow debacle is a particularly useful indicator, as any ‘just transition’ arguments fall limp here. The third runway is of course about expansion – not retention – of an industry, and one set to overwhelmingly benefit the frequent-flying wealthy.

The decision not to whip on the vote also revealed the supposedly climate-friendly leadership’s willingness to succumb to face-saving politicking when faced with a rebellious Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). Judging by the list of 119 supporting Labour MPs, this rebellion was driven by centrist denial as much as union sympathy.  

A more recent example of the chasm dividing the Labour leadership from climate sense is a 68-page industrial strategy paper commissioned by the party and published in January, which doesn’t mention climate once.

Emissions are referred to only in the context of a recommendation to exempt heavy industry from the effect of carbon taxes on electricity prices. If this is still the best advice Labour can get on protecting workers in 2019, it has a very long way to go.

Thinking bigger

Labour for a Green New Deal will call itself an insurgent movement of course, seeking to change all this and destroy the absurd dichotomy between jobs and climate that clearly grips so much of the party.

But in the meantime it would do well not to dismiss those who are in a different part precisely because of that false dichotomy. Climate activists must reckon with Labour as it is, not as they would like it to be, and treat those outside accordingly. 

There are also fundamental differences between even the most radical of labour and green politics. Greens look far beyond mere decarbonisation.

The oft-criticised scale and scope of the party’s ‘Policies for a Sustainable Society’ are testament to an awareness that environmental justice is not just about replacing oil fields with wind farms, petrol cars with electric ones.

We have been forced by the facts to think bigger – though the vision itself is unexceptional. The Green party’s philosophical basis begins by arguing that “A system based on inequality and exploitation is threatening the future of the planet on which we depend. 

“A world based on cooperation and democracy would prioritise the many, not the few, and would not risk the planet’s future with environmental destruction and unsustainable consumption.”

Ecological crises

It is true that the environmental movement generally has struggled to build en masse, to extricate the utopia (or dystopia) from the transition, and to take on the uniquely suffocating anti-politics of incrementalism and individualism championed by businesses, governments and mainstream NGOs for decades.

At the same time however, the ecological perspective that underpins this struggle has produced greater honesty about the degree of material sacrifice that global climate justice necessitates for the UK, and for the West.

Fidelity to economic growth, aversion to lifestyle change, reliance on technological solutions and neglect of other ecological crises are not in the target sights of a Green New Deal.

Yet together these problems entirely hobble the deal’s capacity to help create a genuinely sustainable society. These are long-term challenges only Greens seem prepared to confront. 

Ideological ecology

This is not to demarcate needlessly where divisions between the movements exist or may arise. In fact it is the opposite.

One major success identified in the Green New Deal presented to the US Congress by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the level of clear, popular and purposeful expression and attention it has achieved without yet getting to the level of prescription that would require premature choices on policy.

We can replicate and advance this movement in the UK. But in order to do so there must be mutual understanding that any new hegemony of the left, as detailed in Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future – or ‘restoration story’, as in George Monbiot’s politics of belonging – needs both an “ideological ecology” and an “institutional infrastructure”. 

By necessity this goes beyond one party and all parties. The movement will – whether Labour like it or not – inspire those who, though they may not speak the language of socialism, are ready to support to the hilt whatever level of redistribution of power, money and time is necessary to confront this crisis.

As Gurpreet Bola and Chaitanya Kumar argue in their case for an intersectional Green New Deal, “the weight of science and the pressure of social injustices … can speak to a much larger base than the ideological tropes that segregate us”.

Unnecessary adversarialism

The divestment movement knows this; Extinction Rebellion knows it; the school strikers certainly know it.

At a recent panel event in Parliament organised by the New Economics Foundation, even Rebecca Long-Bailey, speaking to the importance of cross-party cooperation – while sitting alongside Caroline Lucas – appeared to recognise it. 

Those on the Labour left already acknowledge how essential pressure from below would be under a Corbyn government. But it is a fantasy to think that it would be sufficient for this to come from within one party (as anyone with experience in council politics can attest).

While the UK’s electoral system mandates unnecessary adversarialism, an urgent shift on climate action requires the opposite.

The climate crisis is too big – and British electoral politics too tainted – for party manoeuvring to be put towards anything other than building widespread support for systemic upheaval. Labour for a Green New Deal’s founding is a crucial and overdue step change, with the potential to build from below a powerful voice for climate action at every level of the labour movement.

But Green members and activists can say confidently in response: if you fear dilution, you need not fear it from us. And if a broader social movement is to be built, and transformative change to be achieved, you must not act alone.

This Author 

Robert Magowan is an MSc Economics and Governance student at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales and formerly Policy Development Co-Coordinator.

Image: UK Youth Climate Coalition, Flickr.

Over 6 million children had ongoing asthma in 2016 in the US. Globally, asthma kills around 1,000 people every day – and its prevalence is rising. 

This condition has a high economic cost. Each year in the US, more than US$80 billion is lost because of asthma. This is mainly due to premature deaths, medical payments and missed work and school days. The burden is higher for families with asthmatic children, who, on average, spend $1,700 more on health care than families with healthy children.

This article was first published by The Conversation. 

One major environmental factor that might contribute to the development of asthma is air pollution from traffic. In our study, published on April 3, our team mapped where in the U.S. children are most at risk for developing asthma from this type of pollution.

Road traffic 

Asthma is likely the most common chronic disease in childhood, according to the World Health Organization. 

Asthma presents as episodes of wheezing, coughing and shortness of breath due to the reversible, or partially reversible, obstruction of airflow. Six in 10 of children with asthma worldwide had a form of persistent asthma, meaning that either they were on long-term medication or their condition could not be controlled even with medication. 

Traffic pollution contains a mixture of harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter, benzene and sulfur. These pollutants are known to harm health in many ways, causing a number of cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological diseases.

One 2013 review suggested that long-term exposure to common traffic-related air pollutants is linked to the development of asthma in children and adults. 

A much larger meta-analysis in 2017, which focused on children and included more recently published studies, found consistent connections between this type of pollution and childhood asthma development. The researchers concluded that there is now sufficient evidence showing a relationship between this type of pollution and the onset of childhood asthma.

Studies from the nonprofit research group Health Effects Institute and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have concluded along these lines.

Mapping the problem 

Despite this emerging evidence, the burden of childhood asthma due to traffic-related air pollution is poorly documented. Very few studies explore the geographic and spatial variations.

My research team wanted to quantify the connection between exposure to traffic pollution and the onset of childhood asthma across 48 US states and the District of Columbia. We also wanted to make these data open to the public. 

In our analysis, we looked at 70 million kids and conducted all calculations at the census block level, the smallest available geographical unit for census data. We collaborated with researchers from the University of Washington, who modeled the concentrations of nitrogen dioxide, a strong sign of traffic-related air pollution, using satellite imagery combined with environmental ground monitoring data.

We then took data extracted from surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimating childhood asthma incidence in the US. Alongside data from our air pollution models, we used these data to estimate the number of childhood asthma cases caused by exposure to traffic pollution. 

We then created a first-of-its-kind, county-by-county interactive heat map and city-by-city table detailing the distribution of childhood asthma due to nitrogen dioxide across the U.S. in both 2000 and 2010. Each county is represented, and users can explore the data to see the findings for a particular county. 

Public health 

Our analysis found that childhood asthma cases attributable to traffic pollution across the U.S. decreased, on average, by 33 percent between 2000 and 2010. In 2000, we estimated that 209,100 childhood asthma cases could be attributed to traffic pollution, while this number dropped to 141,900 cases in 2010. That’s a major win for public health. 

What caused the decline in traffic-related asthma cases? There may be multiple causes, including more fuel-efficient vehicles, more stringent regulation on nitrogen oxide emissions and, potentially, reductions in total vehicle miles traveled due to the recession.

Despite this encouraging decrease in air pollution and its associated health burden, there were 141,900 childhood asthma cases due to traffic-related air pollution in the U.S. That’s 18% of all childhood asthma cases. 

Moreover, we found that children living in urban areas had twice the percentage of asthma cases attributable to nitrogen dioxide exposures as compared to children living in rural areas.

Our estimates underline an urgent need to reduce children’s exposure to air pollution. We hope that our analyses and heat maps will better inform policymakers, transportation agencies, medical associations and anyone else interested in learning more about the burden of childhood asthma due to air pollution.

This Author 

Haneen Khreis is an assistant research professor at Texas A&M University. This article was first published by The Conversation. 

The moral argument at the heart of the resurgent climate movement in the Global North must be extended beyond the belly of the imperial beast and into the international arena, in order to advance climate justice.

Read Part One: ‘A new chance for climate justice‘

The emperor may have no clothes, but there are a growing number of emperors. Some – such as Trump and Bolsonaro – have shown a disdain for climate policies, actions and international agreements, while also showing a lust for extractive industries that burn fossil fuels and deforest the planet.

For most of the world, climate chaos is a threatening pit, a death spiral. For snakes like Trump, Bolsonaro and the Koch brothers it is a ladder of opportunity.

Climate breakdown 

Climate breakdown will not only result in the death of a lot of people – predominantly poor people, in the Global South – it will also reduce the ability of social movements to organise.

As I wrote yesterday, climate breakdown may also end up providing justification for further authoritarian measures as things fall apart.

The basis for sufficiently limiting the damage done by climate change – international cooperation, long-term planning, government intervention in the economy, and a fair (re)distribution of resources – will be snatched out from under us at precisely the moment that the climate system begins to go completely haywire.

The morality at the core of the Green New Deal in the US – that the poor should not be forced to shoulder the burden of responsibility for cleaning up a mess caused mainly by the rich – is one of its central strengths after years of apolitical arguments for climate action.

Similarly, the argument used by the School Strikes – that future generations should not have to suffer because of the glutinous overconsumption of previous generations – resonates thanks to its moral clarity.

Arithmetic of responsibility 

International climate politics is fundamentally an argument about responsibility. The arithmetic of this responsibility is relatively simple. 100 companies are responsible for 70 percent of all emissions. 10 percent of the world’s population are responsible for 50 percent of emissions (while raking in 50 percent of global income). Overwhelmingly, they live in the global North. 

The US has emitted  eight billion metric tonnes of carbon dioxide since 1850, more than any other country and more than most other countries combined.

An average person in the US has an annual carbon footprint over 16 tonnes and a per capita annual income of over $55,000.

By contrast, an average individual in Mali earns $700 dollars per year and produces less than a tenth of 1 tonne of carbon emissions.

Due to this rapacious overconsumption, from which their immense wealth is derived, Global North countries owe what climate justice movements have come to define as a “climate debt”. The debt is both for over polluting and for denying the South the easy fossil fuel-based pathway of accruing capital.

Climate debt 

Repaying the debt would involve rich countries doing their “fair share” of a collective global effort to stay below 1.5℃.

But what does that mean, in the context of huge historical resource extraction by the rich countries?

The truth is that even radical domestic policies by rich countries to cut emissions won’t do enough by themselves to stop climate chaos, unless the global South does more than its fair share.

Obviously this would be an unfair burden to place at the door of the nations of the South, so the excess must be covered with massive transfers (trillions rather than billions) of finance and technology from the North to the South.

Whether we call it reparations or climate finance, the reality remains the same. It is not impossible – after all, there is always money for bailing out the banks or launching more wars – but convincing the populations of the Global North that addressing climate change requires them to face up to the legacies of colonialism is not easy.

Making reparations

The main point here is not that reparations are required because they are the right thing to do. The point is that they are necessary to avert further breakdown of the planet’s natural systems.

The transformations we need to make cannot be brought about without the countries of the Global South. And those countries cannot play their part if there is no finance, technology, and capacity to do so.

But if the North’s responsibilities are shirked again, if the American way of life is not up for negotiation, if the sound morality of the Green New Deal means eco-socialism for America and barbarism for the rest of the world, then the US completing its fair share is out of the question. And so is the possibility of a habitable earth.

Many proponents of the Green New Deal are very clear about its intra-national justice and equity dimensions. They correctly frame equity as non-negotiable and as the key to climate ambition rather than an obstacle.

This is exactly the kind of attitude that the world urgently needs US-based groups to carry to the inter-national level.

Great escape

This won’t be an easy task, given the US’s historic dedication to obstructionism, from the League of Nations, through Kyoto, to the Paris Agreement.

The US government has always been anti-equity at home, and even more fervently anti-equity in its foreign policy. During international negotiations in 2011, Todd Stern (Obama’s Special Envoy on climate change) quipped “if equity’s in, we’re out”.

Such villainy has provided cover for other Global North countries to not only maintain their own fossil fuel addiction but continue forcing it on others. Collectively, they managed to complete a “great escape” from international law, before replacing that law altogether with an agreement – the Paris Agreement – that does not oblige Global North countries to do anything other than report on their own actions.

The Agreement also explicitly absolves Global North countries of their liability for climate-related disasters. Unsurprisingly, the result is a world on course for 4℃ warming, and complete civilizational collapse.

Ultimately, the persistent refusal by rich people and rich countries to reign themselves in even slightly is going to destroy the basis for life on earth. What makes refusal even sadder is that they wouldn’t even have to live like the global majority to massively reduce their footprint: as climate scientist Kevin Anderson often points out, if the richest 10 percent reduced their emissions to the levels of an average European (i.e. a totally comfortable lifestyle) global emissions would drop 30 percent.

Or as an alliance of civil society groups put it: “If they were obliged to deliver their fair share of climate action, this alone would amount to 67-87 percent of the total 2030 mitigation requirements for 1.5℃”.

Devastating impacts

The past year has shown that there are new openings in the North for climate justice movements to advance system change. But for every opportunity there is a threat. A global movement for climate justice needs to be clear about which is which. 

The prospect of rebalancing power between and within countries may seem like a remote one, but it’s been done before.

Social movements in the South are capable of many things, from overthrowing colonial rule to ousting dictatorships and from ending apartheid to resisting privatization. They are not, however, capable of transforming the world system without strong, radical, and coherent movements in the North. 

The devastating impacts of climate change are already raining down as we have seen across the globe; in Dominica, where a single hurricane caused damages worth 224 percent of the country’s GDP; in Mozambique, where a single storm destroyed 90 percent of a major port city; in India, where 60,000 farmer suicides have been linked to climate change; in Colombia, where worsening drought threatens to wipe out the Wayuu people; and in the Philippines, where many are still struggling to cope 5 years after Typhoon Haiyan.

There is no hope for a global climate justice movement if the majority of people in it are dealing with such impacts while the minority in the North are hamstrung by ideological constraints and business-as-usual modus operandi.

International solidarity 

Movements in the North must therefore do more than simply repackage their existing efforts.

Larger green NGOs are already rebranding, and attracting the funds for doing so, while perpetuating the same old, too little too late strategies of the past.

Groups in the North will have to put meat on the bones of the system change slogan by articulating clear alternatives in order to truly step up to the plate and play their part in a resurgent, ecologically-minded global justice movement.

They will simultaneously have to reconnect with their legacies of international solidarity and build the power of the collective rather than the cult of celebrity in order to leverage the power of the state to limit corporate power.

They have to be more ambitious than they’ve ever been –and this means being more committed to justice, for everyone, than ever before.

This Author 

Nathan Thanki is co-coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a network of over 250 groups around the world struggling for system change. He also coordinates the climate justice constituency at the United Nations climate change negotiations and is a co-founder of The World of 1℃, a communications initiative which aims to improve ecological literacy and promote climate justice framing.

A version of this article was first published on Open Democracy. Read Part One: ‘A new chance for climate justice‘. 

Image: Climate justice activists from Nepal, Peru, Germany, the USA and the Philippines marching in Bonn during COP23. © Claire Miranda, Asian People’s Movement on debt & Development. 

The most popular TV show of all time, Game of Thrones, has been interpreted by many as an allegory for the existential threat posed by fossil fuel-driven ecological breakdown.

While we must band together to address the common threat of ecological breakdown, characters in Game of Thrones must reckon with the mysterious and deadly White Walkers and their frozen Army of the Dead.

The show tells a familiar story about how the urge to keep playing the “game of thrones” remains strong even in the face of impending doom. But the way in which the story unfolds reveals more parallels than are immediately obvious.

Ice and fire

If you look, it’s easy to see: Game of Thrones holds many lessons for climate justice movements around the world.

Like the Westerosi, we are living through a mass extinction event, the gravity of which most of us don’t really appreciate. Concerns on Earth are more about heat than cold – there’s a 95 percent chance that average global temperatures rise 2°C by 2100 – but just as in Game of Thrones, the crises enveloping our world can be heard as a song of ice and fire. 

Droughts have combined with heat waves, leading to out-of-control wildfires in locations as unlikely as Greenland. Permafrost is no longer permanent: in Siberia, summer heatwaves are thawing the tundra, leading to explosions of methane bubbles big enough to rival Cersei’s dragonfire bombing of the Sept. 

The Sept of Baelor blast took out a lot of people, but if the carbon bomb under the permafrost goes off we are all screwed. Permafrost is thought to contain about twice as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere.Watching it thaw is genuine torture. 

Big bubbles of gas aren’t the only thing lurking in what’s left of our icy north. In 2016, anthrax returned to Siberia after a dead reindeer thawed, releasing its zombie disease into an unsuspecting village. The night is certainly dark and full of terrors.

Winter is coming

Everybody knows winter is coming. The Starks have been beating their drum about it forever. It’s literally their motto. Yet nobody seems to care. Sound familiar? 

The challenge in both our world and Game of Thrones is that existential threats don’t automatically unite the realms behind a common cause. Especially when said threats are seen to be far-off, either temporally or geographically.

Naive notions that logic would prevail doomed both Jon Snow’s and liberalism’s approach to communicating the problem. 

For some, seeing is believing and it is enough. But not for everybody, and certainly not for the likes of Cersei. Jon and friends go to extraordinary lengths to secure proof that the threat is real in the hope that this will convince Cersei to abandon her agenda and call a truce. In a better world it would. But neither we nor Jon live in that world. 

For Cersei, it doesn’t really matter that winter is coming to the north. All that matters is maintaining the power of her house and the pursuit of a narrow self-interest. If she can use the fact that winter is coming to her advantage, all the better. That should definitely sound familiar. 

Inequitable worlds

In Westeros, as on Earth, the existential threat isn’t a future problem. It is a now problem which is already claiming lives.

They just happen to be the wrong kind of lives. North of Westeros’ border ice-wall the various Wilding peoples have been forced to abandon their homelands.

In our inequitable world poor, racialized people already fleeing the impacts of devastating extreme weather and climate change are also met largely with indifference and inaction. 

Those in the centres of power in both worlds are as unmoved by faraway destruction as they are by the suffering of the people at their feet – be that in Fleabottom or the left-behind places of the industrialised world.

We would do well to remember that there’s no point appealing to the better natures of the Cersei Lannisters of this world. 

Chaos is a ladder 

Cersei isn’t the only one who sees opportunity in crisis. The late, great, Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish summarised it best: “Chaos isn’t a pit. Chaos is a ladder.” It is a self-evident truth: power always profits from disaster and from our suffering. 

This principle is what drives most of the drama in Game of Thrones, especially in earlier seasons. Those who can deceive their enemy, hide their motive, and sow confusion stand to benefit.

While for most of the world climate chaos is a death pit, for climate villains like Trump and the Koch brothers – or, in Westeros, for villains like Cersei – it is a ladder of opportunity.

The thing is that climate breakdown will not only drive up the death count – predominantly of poor people in the global South. It will also reduce the ability of social movements – the principal agents of system change – to organise. 

Climate breakdown will likely provide a chance for authoritarians to seize more power as things fall apart. It will certainly present ample opportunities for our world’s versions of the mercenary Golden Company, the private security firms such as G4S, as well as other pimps of misery, to grow ever richer as they either enforce or flog stupid ideas like geoengineering to desperate people.

Global justice

Season 8 of Thrones kicks off with Jon and Dany’s united front of Northern houses, Unsullied, and Dothraki amassing in Winterfell for the mother of all battles. In a few weeks we’ll know the result of that battle – who lives and who dies. 

But, in a way, it doesn’t matter. In the game of thrones “you either win or you die.” If the allied forces win against the Night King, the fight in the south resumes. The game of thrones continues. Kings come and go, even Night Kings, but the game remains. 

While the likes of Littlefinger want to keep playing the rigged game, others want to end it. 

We, too, live under a system that seems hegemonic, where the sufferings of the many pay for the luxuries of the few, and where cold-hearted bankers mimic their fictional counterparts in the Iron Bank and pour their money not into what is right but into what they mistakenly think will give them a return. 

So what’s to be done? Daenerys has an answer in line with the movements for global justice: change the system. 

System change 

Breaking the wheel requires power. And, as we know, knowledge isn’t power – power is power. Dany is lucky in that she has 2 dragons (RIP, Viserion). Those of us fighting to break the wheel in our world don’t have any dragons. Nobody is coming to save us in the nick of time with a convenient cache of dragonglass. 

What we have instead are the earthly equivalents of the Northmen, Dothraki, Wildlings, and Unsullied. People who have decided to shake off their chains, break with convention, say “fuck the king,” fuck their kingdoms, and fuck the games they play.

In our own fight for life, the real heroes are those who history tends to forget. Peoples who have already lived through the end of the world. The countless people who have given their own lives in defence of all life.

The choice now facing elites in both worlds is clear, and Daenerys put it best when talking about the Masters of Meereen during her slave liberation crusade: “they can live in my new world or they can die in their old one.” 

It’s system change or armageddon. 

Building coalitions

If Game of Thrones teaches us anything it is about the importance of building coalitions. Whether it is Mance Rayder bringing the wildlings together, or Jon and Sansa uniting the houses of the North, many characters come to realise that collective action is the only way to achieve collective liberation, or even collective survival. 

Davos puts it simply when he tells Daenerys “if we don’t put aside our enmities and band together, we will die. And then it doesn’t matter whose skeleton sits on the Iron Throne.”

Similarly, one of the key life lessons that the Stark girls took from their father is that “when the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies, but the pack survives.”

Movements for system change must also put these wise words into practice. We have so little time to make such large-scale and fundamental transformations that we cannot fight alone in our silos. We must be more than the sum of our parts. 

This is not to say that everyone is part of the solution – clearly some, our world’s “masters”, are not – but it is to say that the eternal in-fighting and ego-driven purity politics of the Left must be kept to an absolute minimum.

Universal fellowship

A wise man in this world once said that “to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Our movements must inspire many people to join a fight we have very poor odds of winning.

The logic of strategy can only take us so far in this regard. We have to speak to people’s hearts and conjure up a kind of commitment that can usually only be born out of a sense of belonging. 

As the white winds sweep across our own world and ecological breakdown intensifies, we will need to take care of each other. Now is a time for community, for universal fellowship, rather than the identity politics of either liberalism or nationalism. 

Conventional wisdom tells us to choose our battles wisely because we can’t do everything at once. Yet this is precisely what our movements for system change must do. We must fight, and win, everywhere.

Obviously, prioritization is a part of strategy. But ultimately we must win on all of the many connected fronts in our fight for life. Some of us might take on thankless tasks of “damage control” in arenas of struggle that are toxic in themselves (I think of my comrades in the international climate negotiations.)

Imperative of hope

Others may be propagandists, educators, recruiters, or foot soldiers on the streets, in workplaces, and online. Many will play several roles. Just as each army in Thrones has archers, chefs, medics, as well as strategists, we all have a role.

Sometimes we fail to recognise this just as we fail to recognise a basic fact which every character in Game of Thrones knows to be true even if they sometimes forget: different terrains require different tactics. We must play to our strengths, and to our enemies weaknesses. 

We don’t yet know how things pan out in Game of Thrones. And while we have a very good idea of our own future should we fail to tackle climate change and ecological breakdown, ultimately we don’t know what will come to pass. That’s a good thing. 

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act.” This isn’t a quote from a Game of Thrones character, but from author Rebecca Solnit. As Littlefinger says, “a lot can happen between now and never.” It is up to us to make it happen. 

Perhaps it was the now-forgotten Ygritte who best captured the essence and imperative of hope. Having already seen the Army of the Dead, and knowing the fate of anyone who gets in the way, she still knew that the point of life is to live. “If we die, we die. But first we’ll live.” 

As our movements start to face up to the horrifying reality of climate breakdown and accept the near impossibility of achieving the necessary transformations, we must hope harder, love more, and defy the predictions. In my opinion this is the most important lesson we could possibly learn. 

This Author 

Nathan Thanki is co-coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a network of over 250 groups around the world struggling for system change. He also coordinates the climate justice constituency at the United Nations climate change negotiations and is a co-founder of The World of 1℃, a communications initiative which aims to improve ecological literacy and promote climate justice framing.

Image: BagoGames, Flickr. 

Environmental protesters have threatened to bring London to a standstill as they attempt to disrupt some of the capital’s busiest areas and force the Government to declare a climate emergency.

Activists have pledged to block five central locations including Parliament Square in a non-violent act of resistance and rebellion that campaigners say could go on for weeks.

Thousands of people will converge on Marble Arch, Oxford Circus, Waterloo Bridge, Piccadilly Circus, as well as near Parliament, peacefully blocking traffic and creating a “festival” of action including people’s assemblies, performances, talks, workshops and food, campaign group Extinction Rebellion said.

International

The movement, which is demanding the government takes urgent action on climate change and wildlife declines, has received support from actress and activist Dame Emma Thompson and former archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams.

Speaking at a meditation on the eve of the protests Dr Williams said humans had declared war on nature.

He said: “We are here tonight to declare that we do not wish to be at war. We wish to make peace with ourselves by making peace with our neighbour Earth and with our God.”

Thompson has previously said of the demonstrations: “It is time to stand up and save our home.”

Organisers said: “The International Rebellion begins and Extinction Rebellion will be bringing London to a standstill for up to two weeks.

Camp

“They will be blocking five of the city’s busiest and most iconic locations in a non-violent, peaceful act of rebellion where they invite people to join them for several days of creative, artist-led resistance.”

Demonstrators arrived at London’s Hyde Park on Sunday, some having journeyed to the city on foot in recent weeks from various parts of the UK for what is described as an “International Rebellion”.

Monday will see people in at least 80 cities in more than 33 countries hold similar demonstrations on the same environmental issues, campaigners said.

While organisers encouraged people to set up camp in Hyde Park overnight into Monday, they have been warned they could be breaking the law by doing so is an offence under Royal Parks legislation.

Disruption

A spokeswoman for The Royal Parks said Extinction Rebellion had not asked for permission to begin the protest in the park and that camping is not allowed.

Police said their operational response to camping “would be dependent on what if any other issues might be ongoing at the time”.

Scotland Yard said they have “appropriate policing plans” in place for the demonstrations and that officers will be used from across the force “to support the public order operation during the coming weeks”.

Police advised people travelling around London in the coming days to allow extra time for their journey in the event of road closures and general disruption.

This Author

Aine Fox is a reporter for the Press Association. Image (c) Press Association. 

Humans have declared war on nature and put progress before the planet, the former archbishop of Canterbury said as environmental protests aim to bring London to a standstill.

Dr Rowan Williams said the world is in a crisis which could be called “being at war with ourselves”.

He spoke at a meditation event outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the capital yesterday attended by activists preparing to take part in mass demonstrations organised by the Extinction Rebellion group.

War

Sitting on the ground amid protesters who held flags and banners, he said: “We have declared war on our nature when we declare war on the natural world.

“We are at war with ourselves when we are at war with our neighbour, whether that neighbour is human or non-human.

“We are here tonight to declare that we do not wish to be at war. We wish to make peace with ourselves by making peace with our neighbour earth and with our God.”

Non-violent

Praying at the all-faith gathering, he added: “We confess that we have polluted our own atmosphere, causing global warming and climate change that have increased poverty in many parts of our planet.

“We have contributed to crises and been more concerned with getting gold than keeping our planet green. We have loved progress more than the planet. We are sorry.”

Extinction Rebellion, which describes itself as a non-violent direct action and civil disobedience group, said the protests at major central London locations including Parliament Square and Oxford Circus from Monday “will be bringing London to a standstill for up to two weeks”.

This Author

Aine Fox is a reporter for the Press Association. Image (c) Press Association. 

ExxonMobil’s record of spreading doubt about climate science, despite internally recognising the impact of its fossil fuel products, was the focus of a public hearing on climate denial recently held in the European Parliament.

The event was informative and shed light on climate denial tactics by big polluters. But ExxonMobil did not bother to show up and face questions from elected representatives.

Such flagrant disregard for a democratically elected institution, added to the corporation’s history of devastating climate denial, must now mean an end to the company’s access to policymakers.

Destructive impact

ExxonMobil declined an invitation to the first hearing by a public institution into the company’s climate duplicity, saying it was prevented from participating by ongoing court cases in the US.

The litigation in question alleges that ExxonMobil knew about the destructive impacts of fossil fuels on the climate and worked to cover them up.

The fossil fuel giant said in its response to parliament: “Public commentary, such as would be solicited at the hearing, could prejudice those pending proceedings”.

Despite claiming that it cannot engage in commentary on this topic, ExxonMobil runs a website devoted to defending itself against the charges they face in these very court cases. 

At the hearing, climate denial expert Geoffrey Supran described the company’s system of deceiving the public and policymakers to shelve action that could hurt their profit margins.

Supran has studied 200 internal company documents going back 50 years, most of which acknowledge the science that burning fossil fuels would lead to climate change.

Meanwhile, the company continued a decades-long campaign of paid ads in US media casting doubt on that same science and contending that the role of greenhouse gases in climate change was unclear.

Climate misinformation

Other reprehensible tactics were also employed. For instance, ExxonMobil was a member of the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a corporate alliance that lobbied against emissions regulation from 1989 to 2002.

The GCC spent $30 million campaigning against the Kyoto protocol and was so successful that the White House told them that President Bush “rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you.”

This calculated campaign of deliberate climate misinformation was very successful – and it’s not over. Still today, big oil and gas companies continue to fund climate denial groups and fight against solutions like renewable energy and strict emissions reduction targets.

According to a report by influence map, the world’s five largest oil and gas companies spend around $200 million a year on lobbying against climate action. 

A recent report by lobby watchdog Corporate Europe Observatory showed that in Brussels ExxonMobil spends an estimated €3.5m on lobbying every year and enjoys regular access to top-level policymakers at the European Commission.

Access denied

ExxonMobil also sits on several key EU expert groups and advisory panels. Indeed, the company’s influence in Brussels is such that the Commission tried to enlist its help in EU-US trade talks in 2013, considering ways to smooth the firm’s expansion in Africa, Russia and South America.

There can be no doubt that this company is a behemoth of corporate influence with tentacles that stretch into all areas of EU policymaking.

However, as the teenagers of the inspirational climate strike movement have been showing us from the streets recently, the fightback to protect the planet needs to tackle powerful forces if it is going to be effective.

Despite the treacherously greedy record of ExxonMobil, six of its 12 Brussels lobbyists have badges allowing them direct access to the European Parliament. This must end.

My political group in the European Parliament will propose ExxonMobil be stripped of its access badges and become only the second corporation, after Monsanto in 2017, to lose access to MEPs.

Safeguarding

In 2017, Monsanto (now a division of chemicals giant Bayer) refused to attend a hearing about the effects of its weed-killer glyphosate. It faced consequences, so should ExxonMobil.

While not enough to curb the influence of these dodgy companies on decision-making in the EU, such a move would be a step towards ending the fossil fuels industry’s capture of climate policy and would send a signal to other big businesses that this institution is no longer their playground.

Ultimately, it’s a question of accountability. If the fossil fuels industry does not want to hear what we have to say, fine, there’s the door.

We cannot accept that these nefarious, two-faced organisations have representatives on the inside weakening and delaying crucial legislation, while the young people outside are screaming the truth about what needs to be done to safeguard the planet. It should be the other way around.

This Author 

Lynn Boylan is an Irish MEP from Sinn Féin and the European United Left–Nordic Green Left group.

Right of Reply 

Following the publication of an earlier article on this subject, Richard Scrase, media adviser at ExxonMobil, commented: “We … believe that market-based systems that place a uniform, predictable cost on greenhouse gas emissions are more effective policy options than mandates or standards. Market-based policies more effectively drive consumer behaviour and technology innovation, while mandates and standards limit consumer choice and can perpetuate ineffective technologies.”

Demands for an unprecedented transformation of society have moved from the fringe ideas of eco-socialists to the mainstream debate in the Global North in the past year.

The “Green New Deal” is gaining traction both among US Democrats and the UK’s Labour Party. There’s a growing desire for positive and visionary ideas, and a growing recognition of the scale and time frame of the challenge.

Read ‘System change and internationalism’ tomorrow.

We can see the same desire in the explosion of “Extinction Rebellion” and the phenomenal School Strike 4 Climate. These initiatives have emerged in different ways and represent different, and internally diverse politics, but they all speak to the same tendency: a profound sense of panic among people in the Global North.

Strategic value

There is much to praise and be heartened by in these shifting politics, but there are is a danger of missteps which could roll back the modest advances climate justice movements have made in the past few decades, and even contribute to the political forces we oppose.

We need to debate the strategic value of the choices being made. We cannot afford to be uncritical, nor nihilistic.

For years, while climate justice movements fought to show climate change as a real and present danger resulting from a rigged economic system, and to build people power to change the system, NGOs from the Global North used their superior access, resources, and media connections to call for pragmatism and reform.

But the breakdown of climate and other natural systems is occurring faster and with worse impacts than predicted, including in Europe and North America. And we are starting to see more urgency in the words of those same northern NGOs and more coverage in the media generally.

The IPCC’s Special Report on the Global Warming of 1.5℃ broke through in the north, with newspapers carrying headlines like “12 years left to save the world” (although the report itself did not say that).

Equality

Amid the resultant clamour for “climate action”, demands for “climate justice” have sometimes been drowned out.

“Climate justice” is usually divorced from the international context in which it was born, and stripped of its specific principles and demands – developed in democratic processes such as the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth – that make climate change a question of justice rather than a quibble about emissions.

To her credit, Greta Thunberg does speak about equity and is clear that the “sufferings of the many” in the south underwrite the “luxury of the few” in the North.

She has said that to avoid the end of human civilisation will require a massive overhaul of the dominant economic logic, and in particular the logic of consumerism that has developed over the past century in the north and is now being exported worldwide.

But her points in this regard are frequently overlooked and it is often only the urgency in her message that gets picked up. This is no fault of Greta.

Rather, it is the fault of the Global North’s mainstream NGOs who have conditioned mainstream media to ignore the need for just and systemic responses in favour of unhelpful, sensationalist “X years to save the world” headlines.

Clear heads

History shows us that far-right movements have experience in mobilising the idea of ecological preservation alongside nationalist exceptionalism.

A recent Buzzfeed exposé suggested the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) had been willing to “get into bed” with paramilitary human rights violators to help their vision of preserving an ahistorical and dehumanised “nature”.

With these tendencies in mind, it would be extremely irresponsible to demand an urgent and robust response to climate change without qualifications as to what kind of action is it to be carried out, on what terms, and by whom.

We might feel a growing sense of panic but we need to keep cool heads. Declaring a state of ecological emergency can provide another excuse for making “tough choices” about who lives and who dies and who must sacrifice.

State of emergency

Others have pointed out how many countries, including the US, have been in a constant “state of emergency” for decades. 

As Casey Williams writes in The Outline: “The history of such emergencies shows that they result in the expansion of repressive state power, short-circuiting political debate in favor of urgent, often militarized action to protect narrowly national interests, permitting governments to selfishly marginalise affected people even further.”

It may seem far-off, but we can already see, amid the clamour for climate action, support for dangerous distractions such as geoengineering and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS).

These unproven technologies are likely to profit corporations while hurting people, driving biodiversity loss, and contributing to chronic hunger.

They are vigorously opposed by climate justice movements who point out that “net-zero emissions” as a demand leaves the door open to such false solutions and creates perverse incentives to carry on with extractivism as normal.

The threat of the current moment is that we end up reinforcing a dangerous “action at any cost” dynamic.

Systemic issues

One of the slogans of the climate justice movement is “system change, not climate change” because climate change is but one expression of wider and deeper systemic issues which need addressing. Climate breakdown makes changing the system even more necessary of course.

The fight for climate justice is not only about cutting carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases, it is about the fundamental transformation of the systems that govern and underpin our lives.

The fossil fuel-dominated energy system leaves one billion people with little or no electricity. It’s not enough to change the fuel source of such a system. We need a people’s owned and controlled, decentralised energy system, based on sources of energy that are not only clean and renewable, but also safe.

Though we might not want to grapple with this emergent reality, even large scale solar and wind rely on the extraction of materials, and sometimes the coercion and displacement of communities.

So it’s time to rethink the entire system of producing and consuming energy, including the question of ownership.

Inequality and exploitation

Our current and cruel food system is another major source of greenhouse gas emissions – and it sees roughly one third of all food produced go to waste while close to a billion people go hungry each year.

Transport, housing and urban design are comparable in that they don’t actually serve the real needs of the majority of people while at the same time being incredibly polluting.

Our entire economic system fosters inequality between and within nations while exploiting natural resources in a manner and rate that is leading to ecological collapse.

All these sectors must be radically restructured through a rapid, just transition to systems that serve the needs of peoples rather than profit.

There’s not really any choice: we must live within the limits of local ecosystems and ultimately with the whole Earth system. We can’t just swap coal for solar and beef for soya and carry on with business as usual. 

Fair share

A Green New Deal tied to economic growth is useless to us. As thinkers such as Jason Hickel constantly remind us, resources must be more fairly shared between the many and the few, while consumption itself must be scaled down. 

Fundamentally we require different ways of relating to each other and the world, and many such alternatives already exist in the traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, as well as in the sub-cultures and movements for alternatives of people living in industrial civilisation.

It is important and encouraging that the new climate politics, embodied in the Green New Deal and School Strike For Climate, is not talking narrowly about “environmental” issues, but rather speaks as to many interrelated issues which cannot be addressed in isolation.

There are no environmental issues which are not also social issues, and vice versa.

The new climate politics must make no accomodation to those who seek to preserve the system intact, with either the fuel source changed, or some minor stops put on the most extreme vulgarities. The emperor has no clothes, as even striking school children now say, and no amount of fig leaves will make it otherwise.

This Author 

Nathan Thanki is co-coordinator of the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, a network of over 250 groups around the world struggling for system change. He also coordinates the climate justice constituency at the United Nations climate change negotiations and is a co-founder of The World of 1℃, a communications initiative which aims to improve ecological literacy and promote climate justice framing.

A version of this article was first published on Open Democracy. Read System change and internationalism tomorrow. 

Image: Climate justice activists from Nepal, Peru, Germany, the USA and the Philippines marching in Bonn during COP23. © Claire Miranda, Asian People’s Movement on debt & Development.