The impacts of climate change are felt more keenly by women, minorities and people living in poverty. But the majority of climate change research and negotiation is undertaken by men – the voices of those most at risk are the least audible. 

This is mirrored in climate change and eco-dystopian fiction, in which women often suffer the worst effects, but the heroic solution is driven by Western scientists. This narrative is also reinforced by climate change communication, which focuses on the technological and political changes driving the ‘fight’ against climate change. 

Indigenous and Third World actors are often cast as passive victims, or in some cases as the perpetrators of environmental degradation in their own lands.

Under Her Eye

Representing indigenous, non-western or oppressed groups and societies as either passive victims or environmentally naïve perpetrators is damaging and Western-centric.  It ignores the entrenched power structures and socio-political injustices that control human-environment interactions and allows these groups no agency either in their current situation, or in the design of their future under climate change.

Under Her Eye: Women and Climate Change was an international arts-science conference and festival run by Invisible Dust, an organisation that works with artists and scientists to explore different ways of communicating and responding to climate change. 

Under Her Eye was unique in that it featured only women speakers who were working to communicate, research or address climate change. Speakers included Caroline Lucas MP, Co-Leader UK Green Party; Hakima El Haité, Moroccan Minister for the Environment and COP22 Host; Laura Tenebaum, former Senior Science Editor, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab; Kate Raworth, author of Doughnut Economicsand Renegade Economist; Christina Figueres, former Executive Secretary if the UNFCCC; and Margaret Atwood, author and inspiration for the conference title. 

The aim of Under Her Eye was to give the platform of communicating and discussing climate change to those who are so often underrepresented in these discussions, namely women, activists, artists, and researchers working in the arts and humanities. 

The conference allowed topics such as carbon trading, seas and oceans, and health and wellbeing, to be addressed from drastically different viewpoints even when the topics covered were very similar. This highlighted that diverse people, disciplines and sectors all have important roles to play in the climate change conversation.

Hostile climates

Alongside the Under Her Eye conference, Invisible Dust ran a fellowship for fifteen young female artists, activists and researchers working with issues related to climate change or the environment. 

Theses women received training and the opportunity to be involved in the conference and associated artist workshops. 

Inspired by the passionate and enlightening discussion in the Under Her Eye conference, a few of the fellows decided to organise a second conference focussing on the exploration of marginalised voices and alternative perspectives on climate change in an academic context, focusing on the contributions of postgraduate and early career researchers.

This conference, titled A Hostile Climate? Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change, aims to interrogate and respond to the meaning of ‘hostile climates’ in diverse and receptive ways, hearing from scholars across the humanities, sciences and beyond as they contribute to engaging discussion on the topic. 

Like Under Her Eye, we will explore the many different facets of climate change and related environmental catastrophes through the lens of different academic and artistic disciplines. The floor will be given to PhD students, early-career researchers and artists who are producing new and innovative work on the topic. 

Keynote speakers

We welcome contributions from all genders, and aim to keep the focus on a diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities and disciplines, in order to allow the voices of a range of demographics to be heard more strongly than they currently are in climate change discourse and debate.

The keynote speakers chosen for the conference are Professor Julie Doyle and Dr David Higgins. Professor Julie Doyle is based in the School of Media at the University of Brighton. Her work examines the role of media, communication and culture in shaping understandings of, and responses to, climate change. 

Professor Doyle’s work focuses on visual communications, and examines the limitations and successes of visual communications in helping make climate change a relevant issue and inspiring engaged and effective action. Professor Doyle is the author of the book Mediating Climate Change, and has been a key figure in establishing the genre of environmental communication.

We (the conference organisers) first met Julie Doyle during the Under Her Eye fellowship, when she ran a seminar inspired by her research and recent. This seminar became one of the core inspirations for the organisation of A Hostile Climate, and it is very fitting that Julie Doyle will be one of the keynote speakers. 

Mediating change

Dr David Higgins is an Associate Professor based in the School of English at the University of Leeds. Coming from a background in Romantic literature and ecology, within recent years Dr Higgins’ work has included the book British Romanticism, Climate Change, and the Anthropocene (Palgrave, 2017), which considers the monumental eruption of Mt Tambora in 1815 and the global crisis that followed. 

This book was part of a broader AHRC-funded project, which culminating in the international conference Mediating Climate Change at the University of Leeds, which brought together scholars from across the humanities to discuss the problems of communication, representation and comprehension that we encounter when considering climate change. 

Dr Higgins also currently works on the AHRC-funded project Land Lines: British Nature Writing, alongside colleagues from St Andrews and Sussex University. In 2018 Dr Higgins won the ASLE-UKI/Orkney Science Festival lecture prize for his lecture ‘Frankenstein on a Changing Planet’, which discussed the failure of Victor Frankenstein to take responsibility for his creation in relation to contemporary debates about anthropogenic impact on our planet. 

Dr Higgins’ work is increasingly focused on engaging wider audiences with environmental issues, and he is currently developing new public collaborations around culture and climate. 

Conference themes

The themes covered in A Hostile Climate include (but are not limited to):

•           The risks of climate change for those living on the margins of society, and how these may be apprehended or mitigated
•           How communities across the globe experience climate change, in a radically different way to those on mainland Europe and the US
•           How technology, entrepreneurship and science could provide benefits for humanity in a climate-changed world OR the possible negative ramifications of reliance on technology in attempting to solve these issues 
•           Non-Western, Indigenous and grassroots approaches to (and understandings of) climate change and related environmental issues
•           Understanding and responding to climate-changed environments through music, art and performance  
•           Climate change and migration: the risks and realities of hostility towards migrants in a climate-changing world, or alternative responses to possible climate change-induced migration

In addition to the conference presentations, we will be holding a small art exhibition instead of the more common academic poster exhibition. This exhibition will display works by young artists relating to climate change, environmental issues, and the inequities and inequalities that cause and arise from such issues. 

Embracing connections 

By including both artists and researchers in the sciences and humanities, we are encouraging attendees to view their research from a perspective beyond their normal purview, and to examine the social and scientific connections between their work and the work of others. 

As Under Her Eye fellow and conference organiser Claire Cooper stated: “One of the greatest difficulties that climate researchers often face is how troublesome it is to disentangle the science from the social impacts. 

“Perhaps the solution is not to further the separation between a work of research and its consequences, but to embrace the connections between the theoretical, the empirical, and the artistic exploration of the questions we ask”.

These Authors

Isabel Cook, Lucy Rowland, Rosamund Portus and Claire Cooper are doctoral researchers exploring climate change and environmental catastrophes from varying perspectives such as archaeology, environmental humanities, and geology. They are Under Her Eye fellows and the organisers of A Hostile Climate conference. More information on the conference can be found on the conference website.

The First Minister’s recent statement to the Scottish Parliament announcing her Programme for Government 2018–19 featured a number of high-level commitments relating to the environment. 

Nicola Sturgeon’s statement emphasised the Scottish Government’s commitment to “move to a low-carbon society”, and the importance of ensuring that economic growth is “environmentally sustainable”.

The Programme for Government statement outlined details of some of the policies and legislation which will play key roles in achieving the Scottish Government’s ambitions concerning the environment. 

Building momentum 

These policies included, for example, the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill, and its 2050 targets which the First Minister described as being “the most ambitious anywhere in the world that is based solely on domestic actions”.

Sturgeon also highlighted the Scottish Government’s commitments to introduce a national deep sea marine reserve, and to continue investing in projects such as the “the central Scotland green network, and the water environment fund”.

Building on the momentum from the Blue Planet TV series, the Scottish Government also announced its intention to introduce a deposit return scheme for drinks containers, and to take action to reduce plastic pollution. 

It remains to be seen what policy and legislative changes in Scotland relating to the environment will be driven by Brexit. Environmental campaigners will want to engage with the Scottish Government, and with politicians of all parties, to influence those changes.

Significantly, the SNP government has no majority in the Scottish Parliament, or in any of its committees including the environment, climate change and land reform committee, which is the lead committee for the new climate change legislation. The Scottish Parliament also has a well founded reputation for openness and transparency. Against this background, the current parliamentary session potentially offers environmental campaigners major opportunities to help shape and influence policy development and legislation relating to the environment in the Scottish Parliament, and at Scottish Government level. 

Top tips

I have jointly written a book and trained people in third sector organisations in how to make the most of opportunities to influence policy and legislation in the Scottish Parliament, and at Scottish Government level. The Scottish Parliament should be accessible to everyone in Scotland.

Below are outlined seven top tips to help environmental campaigners to make the most of these opportunities to influence environmental policy and legislation over this parliamentary session.

1. Develop public affairs strategies which understand politics and politicians. This includes adopting a cross-party approach, and engaging with politicians of all parties (even if you did not vote for them!). Adopting such an approach will increase your chances of influencing policy development and legislation, given the Scottish Government lacks a majority in the Scottish Parliament, and in its committees.
2. Define what you want to achieve, and ensure you can communicate what you want to do, and why, to Scottish Government Ministers, and to MSPs, in a clear and concise fashion. A good exercise is to try and summarise what you want to do in 55 words. If you cannot manage this, because what you want to do is too complex or too vague, then you probably need to rethink your activity!
3. Adopt clear ‘policy asks’ that you want the policy makers to accept and to act upon. Basing your ‘policy asks’ on robust evidence and proven best practice will help to maximise support for your ‘policy asks’ from MSPs and at Scottish Government level. 
4. Don’t expect politicians to have all the answers. You know best about the issues which matter most to you. Be proactive – tell Scottish Government Ministers and MSPs what you want them to do. Invite them to meet you to find out why these issues are important. Don’t just wait, and hope they show an interest.
5. Keep track of what’s going on. Most of the media will tell you about what’s going on in the Scottish Parliament after it has happened. If you want to change what’s going to happen, monitor the Business Bulletin (the timetable of what’s coming up) on the Scottish Parliament’s website. This will provide you with details of forthcoming debates, committee inquiries, parliamentary questions and other relevant business relating to the environment. Ask your local MSPs if they are going to be speaking in, for example, a particular debate relating to the environment, and tell them what you would like them to say. 
6. Don’t be scared of legislation! With the current political balance in the Scottish Parliament there are major opportunities for environmental campaigners to secure significant changes to the law relating to the environment. Tell the politicians about why particular provisions in the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill need to change.Work with the Government and/or with the opposition parties to draft amendments for Stage 2 and, if necessary, Stage 3 of the Bill, and work with members of the committee to secure their support for the amendments to secure these changes.
7. Careful thought should be given to ways in which your organisation can work in partnership to deliver key parts of its wider public affairs strategy, including its response to key legislation such as the Climate Change (Emissions Reduction Targets) (Scotland) Bill. Partnership working to progress specific amendments to this legislation will demonstrate to the committee members considering the Bill, and to the Scottish Government, that your organisation has wider support for the issues it is raising. This will, in certain circumstances, make them more likely to support your amendments to the legislation.

By following these tips you will improve your chances of shaping and improving policy development and legislation relating to the environment, and of ensuring that the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Government take effective action to safeguard the long term future of the environment.

This Author 

Robert McGeachy is an award winning public affairs professional, and the joint author of The Public Affairs Guide to Scotland: Influencing Policy and Legislation published by the Welsh Academic Press.

The DEFRA Consultation that preceded the publication of the Agriculture Bill was called ‘Health and Harmony’, yet there was no reference to the protection of public health. I detailed the glaring omission of anything human health related shortly after the Agriculture Bill had made its first appearance before Parliament. 

Neither the Agriculture Bill nor Michael Gove’s accompanying statements recognised the health risks and related acute and chronic adverse health impacts for rural residents and communities from the continued use of pesticides and other agro-chemicals on crop fields across the UK.

This was staggering – albeit unsurprising given the Government’s inaction on pesticides – considering that these highly toxic agrochemicals remain the biggest contributor of damage, pollution, and contamination of the air, soil, water and overall environment in agricultural areas, as well as damaging to human health. 

Vital amendment

There is now some renewed hope on the horizon. A specific amendment to the Agriculture Bill for the protection for rural communities has recently been tabled by the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas – amendment New Clause 10 (NC10) entitled “Application of pesticides: limitation on use to protect human health.” 

This vital amendment prohibits the application of any pesticide for the purpose of agriculture near (a) any building used for habitation, (b) any building or open space used for work or recreation, or (c) any public or private building where members of the public may be present including, but not limited to, schools, nurseries, and hospitals.

This is the most important health protection measure that the campaign I run, the UK Pesticides Campaign, has been calling for since the outset in 2001. 

The ongoing campaign petition – which calls on the Prime Minister Theresa May and DEFRA Secretary Michael Gove, to urgently secure the protection of rural residents and communities by banning all crop spraying and use of any pesticides near residents’ homes, schools, and children’s playgrounds – has been signed by nearly 6000 people, the majority of which are affected UK residents.

The petition has also been signed by a number of prominent figures including Hillsborough QC Michael Mansfield, Stanley Johnson, Jonathon Porritt, Gordon Roddick, Ben Goldsmith, and Caroline Lucas herself, among others.

Health scandal 

The prohibition of pesticide use in the locality of the areas listed in the NC10 amendment must cover substantial distances, as small buffer zones won’t provide adequate protection. Scientific studies (such as Lee et al 2002) have found pesticides miles away from where they were originally applied and calculated health risks for rural residents and communities living within those distances.

The existing evidence is unarguable regarding the damage agricultural pesticides are causing to both people and planet. Yet still no action has been taken by successive governments on this. This is without a doubt one of the biggest public health scandals of any time.

While operators generally have protection when using agricultural pesticides – such as use of personal protective equipment, respirators, and filtered cabs – rural residents and communities have had absolutely no protection at all for over seven decades. 

There are many thousands of known cases of adverse health impacts reported by rural residents across the UK, but which the government has continued to blatantly ignore. With millions of rural residents exposed in crop sprayed areas there will undoubtedly be many more unreported cases.

Rallying support

The NC10 amendment tabled by Caroline Lucas is crucially important. It provides an opportunity to get parliamentary support for the protection of rural residents and communities, especially the most vulnerable groups such as babies, children, pregnant women, the elderly and those already ill and/or disabled – none of whom should ever have been exposed to cocktails of these poisons in the first place.

A tweet I sent out last week regarding the NC10 amendment has received considerable support and has had many shares so far on social media including from groups such as the Sustainable Food Trust and the Soil Association, as well as prominent figures in the food and farming sector such as Peter Kindersley, Craig Sams, Joanna Blythman, Jonathan Porritt, and others such as the BBC Environment correspondent Roger Harrabin, Livia Firth, Glynis Barber.

The Director of the CLA Christopher Price actually ‘liked’ an earlier tweet that also contained the information about the NC10 amendment – rather surprisingly considering the CLA’s often pro-pesticides stance

If parts of the ‘industry’ even support this measure then here’s hoping that other MPs – especially those in rural constituencies – will also sign up to and support this crucial NC10 amendment for public health protection.

Take action

Now is the time for rural residents and communities to speak out as loudly as we can, contact our MPs and ask them to support the New Clause 10 (NC10) amendment entitled “Application of pesticides: limitation on use to protect human health.”

The post-Brexit UK agricultural bill and policy provides a real opportunity for the UK to clean up agriculture once and for all, and adopt a non-chemical farming policy.

Removing toxic chemicals from food production would then protect not only the health of rural residents and communities, as well as other members of the public, but also the environment, wildlife, pollinators, and other species that are being wiped out from the continued use of such toxic chemicals.

This Author

Georgina Downs is a journalist and campaigner. She runs the UK Pesticides Campaign, which specifically represents rural residents affected by pesticides sprayed in the locality of residents’ homes, as well as schools, playgrounds, among other areas.

Environmental campaign groups and the waste industry have largely welcomed an overhaul of England’s waste and recycling system announced by the government yesterday, but warned that it would need significant funding.

The waste and resources strategy – England’s first in a decade – proposes a raft of measures to tackle the country’s throw-away culture and boost the recyclability of products. Producers will be mandated to pay the full costs of disposal or recycling of packaging they place on the market, instead of the 10% they pay for currently.

The government also wants to see consistency in which materials can be collected for recycling, and consistent labelling on packaging. Consumers will receive financial incentives to return bottles and cans for recycling; while food waste collections will be weekly, and rolled out across the country.

Expensive plastic

Manufacturers will be encouraged to design products that last longer by mandatory guarantees and extended warranties; while food businesses will have to report food surplus and waste annually, the government has suggested.

It also wants to clamp down on waste crime by introducing compulsory electronic tracking of waste, and tougher penalties for waste operators breaking the law if they mislabel their waste to dodge tax.

Campaign groups including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) and the Aldersgate Group largely welcomed the proposals but wanted more detail on implementation and funding. Full details on how the new policies will be implemented is subject to consultation.

Extra funding

Louise Edge, senior oceans campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said that plans to ensure that companies who create and sell plastic packaging will pay for dealing with the consequences were “really encouraging”.

“This should be a big help in getting difficult to recycle and expensive plastic packaging off our supermarket shelves, driving better product design and much needed investment in refillable and reusable packaging,” she said.

However, she criticised the fact that the proposals would only enter law in 2023, a concern echoed by the Marine Conservation Society and the Campaign to Protect Rural England.

Libby Peake, policy adviser at think-tank the Green Alliance, wrote in a blog that the strategy showed “real ambition”, but success would depend on significant extra funding for enforcement at the Environment Agency and local authorities.

This Author

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

The dialogue of the COP24 climate talks often seem to consist of little but collections of acronyms and buzz phrases.

We need “enhanced ambition” for the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that are written into the Paris Rulebook, with provision for “loss and damage”.

Well of course. But I’m about to make myself potentially unpopular by suggesting that we add another to the list: BAU, meaning Business As Usual. And its reverse, N(ot)BAU.

IPCC warning 

Sessions at COP should come tagged with which category they come in – and the only ones that will be worth going to will be the NBAUs, unless your aim is to challenge the BAU narrative.

Unfortunately in Katowice this month, there were few sessions in the NBAU category. Typical of the BAU was a fashion industry session in which cuts in energy use and increased efficiency were on the agenda; making fewer clothes was not.

While this COP made significant strides in important areas, particularly in acceptance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warning that the world must stay below 1.5 degrees of warming, the proposed actions being presented in side events by researchers and companies, even often by charities and non-governmental campaigners, almost invariably fall short of to the IPCC’s challenge.

That’s without even considering all of the other ways beyond climate change by which we are stretching this planet beyond its limits: the turning of the oceans into a plastic soup, the collapse of biodiversity and bioabundance, as is all too evident with insect numbers, the contamination of waters and soils with pesticides and artificial fertilisers.

What we’re doing now isn’t anything like enough on climate change, and possibly even worse on other issues. What we have to do as a human species is tread far, far more lightly on this planet, take less so we can survive and thrive. We’ll live better while not collapsing the natural ecosystems on which our lives, and economies, depend.

Meaningful change

Yet the models and plans for travel and transport, for feeding and clothing the world, for providing humans with energy for their every desire, on offer at COP suggest that we continue just as we are, indeed that the rest of the world rushes up to the levels now in the Global North, to the three-planet living of the UK – but more efficiently, with new and better technology.

Some of these habits are ones we fell into millennia-ago and have never questioned. But now we need to.

In a session on peatlands, one academic observed that our crops are all dryland species because agricultural models mostly developed in the dry Middle East millennia ago. Growing a variety of crops in rewetted organic soils is clearly essential, yet only just coming on the scientiists’ radar.

I challenged the academics and researchers on a panel that focused on both the desperate urgency of keeping the level of warming below 1.5, and transport, electricity and heating. They were simply assuming more of the same, more efficiently.

Real change was difficult to model, was one of their responses, and I agree that’s true. But we have to imagine it, plan for it and implement it, because there clearly is no alternative. BAU is not an option.

Regenerating consumption 

One of the few sessions in which I heard an exploration of what I’ve called NBAU was in the German pavilion. It was titled “Degrowth”, but that’s a term that often suggests decline and loss, which is not helpful when planning for a future world, and not accurate when we’re talking about transformation to a better life. One of the speakers came up with an alternative, I think better, title: “regeneration”.

That means thinking about societies that work for people, communities that deliver social goods, a natural world allowed again to flourish.

It means banning nearly all single-use plastic, and other single-use containers as well. Transport in bulk, buy into your own containers, and have that cup of tea sitting down in a café, maybe even having a chat (in this loneliness-plagued world). That would end the degradation of plastic-strewn beaches and microplastics-choked oceans.

It means slashing the consumption of animal protein, ending factory farming and the feeding of perfectly good plant food to animals to produce a tiny amount of meat – again, regeneration rather than degradation.

It means not “climate-smart agriculture” – doing what we do now to trash our soils and wildlife slightly less badly – but working with nature with agroecology, enriching soils, varying our diets, using knowledge as the high level input rather than chemicals.

Natural alternatives

When it comes to clothing – which we saw featured here at COP for the first time – it means making garments in quality materials (probably not synthetics, which are just more plastic) to last for the long haul, not “fast fashion” but great clothes.

Also in the German pavilion, I heard a young entrepreneur from the chemical industry talking about his scheme to chemically process complex plastic films containing layers of different materials in Africa. “We need to bring them back to reality,” he said.

It was one of the cases of being more accurate than perhaps he knew. “Reality” surely means that rather than producing complex materials that are extraordinarily challenging to recycle, for products that are generally bad for human health, we should find ways to produce, transport and sell food without the packaging.

Rather than sweet flavoured milk – a corporately sponsored plague now sweeping Vietnam – how about a local fruit, complete with all its natural goodness?

Ah but that’s not what consumers want, you’ll here the proponents of the current system say. Well no, that’s not what’s advertised to them, or, often, offered.

The long haul

There were boxes of free-to-take local Polish apples in boxes at COP. I never managed to snare one. They were always gone before I got to them, but I overheard one American delegate commenting with astonishment: “The taste, it is just amazing! I’ve never had anything like it.”

Nature, left to flourish, can do an amazing job of creating tasty, nutritious, varied foods, quality materials for clothing, manufacture and building, meeting our needs and those of the other species with which we share this planet.

That’s if we let it, and value what it produces enough to keep and maintain it for the long haul.

That’s not business as usual, but business as life – and it has to be if we’re to provide a decent life for everyone within the physical limits of this one fragile planet. Not so much regenerating the world as allowing it to regenerate itself.

This Author 

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

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.