Margaret Thatcher took to the stage at the United Nations and outlined her apparent mission to save the world.

“It is life itself – human life, the innumerable species of our planet – that we wantonly destroy. It is life itself that we must battle to preserve,” she told the world’s political leaders.

“It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.”

The darling of the free market would directly address the apparent conflict between ecological conservation and economic growth: “We must have continued economic growth in order to generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment. But it must be growth which does not plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow.”

Industry, she argued, has a positive role to play. “The multinationals have to take the long view,” she insisted. “There will be no profit or satisfaction for anyone if pollution continues to destroy our planet. The market itself acts as a corrective, the new products sell and those which caused environmental damage are disappearing from the shelves.”

Humility and Respect

She qualified this statement by adding: “We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their object if by their output they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the well-being they achieve by the production of goods and services.”

Thatcher wanted action, not words. She demanded that both the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) – parent organisations to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – were strengthened.

Thatcher wanted to see a binding international framework convention on climate change in time for the World Conference on Environment and Development, which was due to be held in just over two years.

“But a framework is not enough,” she warned. “It will need to be filled out with specific undertakings, or protocols in diplomatic language, on the different aspects of climate change.

“These protocols must be binding and there must be effective regimes to supervise and monitor their application. Otherwise those nations which accept and abide by environmental agreements, thus adding to their industrial costs, will lose out competitively to those who do not.”

The IPCC must meet its targets: “We must not allow ourselves to be diverted into fruitless and divisive argument,” she continued. “Time is too short for that.”

Her conclusion could not have contrasted more starkly with economist Friedrich Hayek’s attack on reason the previous year.

She argued: “Today, we have learned rather more humility and respect for the balance of nature. But another of the beliefs of Charles Darwin’s era should help to see us through – the belief in reason and the scientific method.

“Reason is humanity’s special gift…Now we must use our reason to find a way in which we can live with nature, and not dominate nature.”

She then ended on a religious note: “We are not the lords, we are the Lord’s creatures, the trustees of this planet, charged today with preserving life itself–preserving life with all its mystery and all its wonder – may we all be equal to that task.”

Creative Solutions

The prime minister was as good as her word and on returning from the United Nations she established and secured funding for the Hadley Centre for Climate Protection and Research at the Met Office.

The IPCC submitted its first “assessment review” to to the UN general assembly in October 1990.

A framework convention on climate change was scheduled for the UN Conference on the Environment and Development (UNCED), scheduled for Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.

The then US president George Bush confirmed that “the United States is strongly committed to the IPCC process of international co-operation on global climate change,” adding: “Well informed free markets yield the most creative solutions.”  

Towards the end of the year his Secretary of State James Baker resigned because he owned shares in oil companies.

The international campaign to muster the political will to save the world from catastrophic climate change was launched by the podium of the United Nations in November 1989.

It was launched by the champion of the free market, Margaret Thatcher. In the coming decade the market, and its most powerful constituents, the major oil companies, would respond with equal certainty and resolve.

Lawson Boom

She spoke again at the Second World Climate Conference held at the Palais des Nations, Geneva on 6 November 1990: “The need for more research should not be an excuse for delaying much needed action now,” she demanded. “There is already a clear case for precautionary action at an international level.”

Then 16 days later she would resign as prime minister.

Thatcher had been mortally wounded by her chancellor Nigel Lawson’s resignation. The election results of June that year had been “an unmitigated disaster for the government”.

The drubbing at the ballot box was due mainly to the steep rise in interest rates Lawson had imposed at the end of his chancellorship in a desperate attempt to stem inflation and control what became known as the Lawson Boom.

The market appeared not only to be free but wildly and damagingly out of control.

The government was rocked by a series of disasters and scandals, culminating in the Poll Tax riots in Trafalgar Square and Geoffrey Howe resigning as deputy prime minister in November 1990.

He was the last remaining member of Thatcher’s first cabinet and had been considered among her closest allies at the beginning of her political career.

His resignation made it impossible for the prime minister to continue. The member of the Mont Pelerin Society and close associate of the Institute of Economic Affairs had, in many ways, made Thatcher and now he chose to break her.

Thatcher announced her intention to resign after 11 years in power. The following week she was photographed leaving 10 Downing Street in a government Jaguar, attempting to suppress tears of fury and betrayal.

Years later she would mysteriously reverse her principled stance on climate change in what would be a vital and exhilarating coup for the sceptics.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

The forests are burning, the temperatures are soaring and people are dying. And this is just the beginning. The silence on the climate crisis has become deafening this summer, despite record temperatures around the globe.

In complexity theory, when a system comes under increasing pressure there is often a period of calm before a “phase transition” – when the system breaks down into new state. This calm is about to break.

The conventional campaigning has, yet again, revealed its failure to influence the political establishment. Thirty years since scientists told us that we are heading for ecological collapse, a majority of Labour and Tory MPs voted through the UK’s biggest carbon intensive infrastructure project – the third runway at Heathrow Airport.

Rebellious struggle 

Once completed, the expanded Heathrow will produce more carbon emissions than the entire country of Portugal. No act confirms more clearly the pathological criminality of our political class. 

So it has come to this: rebellion! 

This November we will rebel. We will go to London and block transport and government infrastructure. We will be arrested. Once released we will do it again.

To stop us they will have to imprison us. We will appeal to people to rise up and join us. But whether they do so is not important. What is important now is for us to make a stand – to engage in a direct political struggle that is appropriate to the crisis we face.

Climate catastrophe 

We must speak the blunt truth – we are heading for extinction.

Finally after decades of emailing, donating, marching; after years of growing depression, desperation, and despair, we have reached this point.

We will no longer tolerate the destruction of this beautiful planet. The humiliation of seeing this crime of all crimes take place year in and year out throughout our whole lives. We have decided that crying alone in the dark is no way to deal with our piercing grief at this horror.

We are going act and action is the antidote to despair. This is our choice today.

Not so long ago we were told by scientists in no uncertain terms that if we exceed 350 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 in the atmosphere we would face catastrophe. We are now at 410.

Rights and duties

The increase used to be 1ppm a year, then it rose to 2ppm, we are now approaching 3ppm. In a decade or so we will be crossing 450ppm – the equivalent of the Paris limit of 2C.

In the words of Professor Peter Ward, at 500ppm “all bets our off”. He means that we will have triggered the geophysical feedbacks that will lead to our extinction.

After years of denial we finally have to accept the terrible truth – those in authority are going to kill us – the infliction of unimaginable suffering on billions of innocent people. This is what is planned – openly and wilfully. There is no greater crime. 

So the time for facts and figures is over – the speculations, the distractions – the talks that lead to more talks. We are adults and no longer children.

Already, around the country, hundreds are answering our call. We started our presence in London, Bristol, and Stroud. We now have groups in Frome and Exeter. The rebellion is spreading.

Get involved

Extinction Rebellion (XR) needs you! We are calling for a national mobilisation on the biggest scale ever.  We demand that carbon emissions be reduced to zero by 2025.

This aim is in line with The Climate Mobilisation (TCM) in the USA. We can do this, but we need your help.

Please ‘like’ our Facebook page, follow @ExtinctionRebellion on Twitter,  and message us to offer support.

As well as the civil disobedience on the frontline, we seek media specialists, writers, editors, public speakers, software designers, performers and artists of all kinds to help spread the XR campaign.

This Author

Rogar Hallam is an organic farmer, public speaker and carbon divestment campaigner.

I planted my first grape tomato bush when my son William was three. I didn’t think much of it, other than I’d get to eat a few vine-fresh tomatoes here and there. When the flavor of that first ripe tomato crossed my taste buds I knew I had been doing fruits and vegetables wrong for decades.

For the rest of that season my wife and I explored different farms in the area for fresh local produce. That summer we discovered that zucchini wasn’t actually a flavorless vegetable, radishes have quite a zing to them, and that kale was still gross no matter where it came from.

The next season we started our own modest garden and I was impressed by how easy it was to grow a few of my favorites. I was eating my own zucchini and peas by late June.

Enjoying food

I was hooked on gardening and I wanted to do my best to make sure William was hooked too. But he wasn’t terribly interested in pulling weeds and picking cutworms from the bottom of tomato plants.

I set out to make gardening fun for him so that we could work on the garden and enjoy the food together. After a couple seasons I have some advice for would-be gardeners with children:

You’ll find that letting them have their own garden instead of helping you in yours will be much more fun for you and the kids. Having their own garden is a very exciting idea for them and it helps to keep them from getting in the way when you’re sweating buckets while pulling weeds out of yours.

Clearly define their space with a little hardscaping like stacked stones or a small vinyl fence. Painting the border a fun color will make it feel more at home.

They probably have their favorites, so as long as they grow well in your region there’s no reason to stear them towards other plants. If you haven’t already sprouted your seeds indoors I would start with seedlings bought from the store.

Craft activities 

Kids can be a bit impatient and they aren’t going to want to wait a couple weeks for the seeds to sprout.  Let them feel like gardeners right away with some plants and you have a better chance of capturing and keeping their interest all season long.

Kids aren’t going to want to be gardeners all of the time. They love doing other crafts too. A perfect way to keep them interested in growing their own food is to do a craft that relates to their garden.

One of the easiest and most fun activities is to make a sign that lets everyone know that this is their garden. A wood board on a stake is all you need. Paint it their favorite color and write their name on it. 

You can take this a step further and make markers for the individual plants too. All you need to do is glue a few popsicle sticks together and paint them up. Write the names of the plants on them and press them in the ground. It doesn’t take long to make these signs but they leave a big impression on the kids.

Plant a sunflower: when you’re three feet tall a six foot tall plant with an enormous bright yellow flower on top is fascinating. They’re easy to grow and it’s fun to show them how the flower turns to face the sun as it moves across the sky.

Laying foundations

Buy tools that will last. I would get a few of the basics from your local gardening center and paint the handles or even just write their name on the handle in permanent marker.

William has grown into a teenager and isn’t interested in gardening right now, but the foundations for being a locavore and gardener has been laid.

He understands and appreciates the difference between store bought and locally grown, and I’m sure that when he has a home of his own he will have a garden with some of his favorites in it. 

Maybe he’ll even set aside a small piece of his garden for me to grow sunflowers and raspberries in.

This Author

Scott Jenkins is a gardening father of two living in Connecticut. He is the editor of Architypes.net, a home improvement website that his wife owns and operates. Find him on Twitter @scottjenkins

Systematic watches from both land and sea have been undertaken at locations all around our coasts and inshore waters from Shetland in the north to the Isles of Scilly and Channel Islands in the south. 

The 2018 National Whale and Dolphin Watch was organised by the Sea Watch Foundation, Britain’s oldest marine mammal research and education charity, and conducted between 28 July 2018 and 5 August 2018.

Over a nine-day period, more than five hundred sightings of thirteen different species were reported, and more records are still coming in. 

In Scotland

The Northern Isles of Shetland and Orkney remained the stronghold for killer whales in the UK. 

During the National Whale and Dolphin Watch, pods of up to five animals were seen around Orkney, and daily at multiple locations in Shetland. One sighting recorded over 80 individuals fast swimming off Lerwick. 

The bottlenose dolphin was the most commonly sighted species in the Moray Firth, but particularly in the outer Firth southwards as far as Angus and Fife. Minke whales and harbour porpoise were also regularly seen. A humpback whale was sighted off Torry Battery in the City of Aberdeen, feeding in the area and performing a barrel roll in the water with its pectoral fin. 

Over on the West Coast, harbour porpoises were seen at widespread locations. This is currently one of the strongholds of the species in Britain. The second most commonly seen species was the minke whale, also widespread but recorded particularly around the Inner and Outer Hebrides. 

Most excitingly, a fin whale and a pod of five long-finned pilot whales were spotted in deep waters near the isolated Outer Hebridean island of North Rona last week.

In England

Porpoises have become less common in recent years in the northern North Sea around Shetland and Orkney, but further south off eastern England the species has increased. 

This summer has seen a good number of white-beaked dolphin sightings in Northumberland, andhumpback whale sightings all around the UK, with one individual popping up this last week off Flamborough Head in Yorkshire. 

This summer only one harbour porpoise sighting has been reported so far during National Whale and Dolphin Watch in south-eastern England. The bad weather at the beginning of the week combined with local environmental conditions that do not favour concentrations of fish prey. This region of England also receives the greatest amount of shipping of anywhere in the British Isles. 

This has been a great summer for cetacean sightings in Devon and Cornwall, which are normally seen at many locations around the Southwest Peninsula. The other species regularly seen is the common dolphin, and there were many sightings of groups of up to one hundred at scattered locations from Berry Head in Devon to Falmouth in Cornwall. 

Minke whales were also seen in Falmouth Bay, Cornwall, and in Labrador Bay, Torquay, South Devon. 

Wales

Cardigan Bay in West Wales holds the largest coastal population of bottlenose dolphins in Britain. Around New Quay Harbour, dolphins have been seen almost daily. Bottlenose dolphins were also sighted off the north coast of Anglesey at Point Lynas. 

The most common and widely distributed marine mammal in Wales, however, is the harbour porpoise, with sightings daily during this year’s event from New Quay and Llangrannog in Ceredigion, and several locations in Anglesey with highest numbers at Point Lynas – one of the best spots to see the species in the whole of Britain. 

Schools of common dolphins numbering up to fifty individuals were seen at several sites from St Anne’s Head around Pembrokeshire to Puffin Island in Anglesey.  

A rare visitor of this year’s National Whale and Dolphin Watch event was a striped dolphin, which live stranded at Pendine in South Wales on July 31st.

Isle of Man

Increasingly, sightings of bottlenose dolphins are being made in northwest England during summer, and this year, the National Whale and Dolphin Watch resulted in the species being seen from Bispham in Lancashire.

Large aggregations of common dolphins (with a pod of 150 individuals), a mixed group of bottlenose dolphin and Risso’s dolphins (with a pod of 60 individuals), harbour porpoises, and two other sightings of Risso’s dolphins were seen from eat and west side of the Isle of Man. 

Risso’s dolphins have become regular visitors here, particularly in summer.

Dr Chiara Giulia Bertulli, Sightings Officer for Sea Watch Foundation praised the event: “What an incredible variety of cetacean species sighted this year during National Whale and Dolphin Watch, despite the unsettled weather at the beginning of the week. 

“It is thanks to volunteer observers who provide us with sightings data from all around the British Isles that we are able to continuously monitor and protect local whale, dolphin and porpoise species. 

“It is also thanks to this long-lasting collaboration that we have built up the largest and longest running sightings scheme in the world” says Dr Chiara Giulia Bertulli, Sightings Officer for Sea Watch Foundation.”

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This article was based on a press release from the Sea Watch Foundation. All the verified sightings so far can be viewed on line (http://www.seawatchfoundation.org.uk/nwdw-2018/) where they are updated as more reports come in.

Bert Bolin, the founder of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was the first scientist to detect signals from the coal and oil industry that there would be serious resistance to climate science and its policy implications. 

As soon as governments began taking the issue seriously, the energy industry mobilised its greatest assets in order to combat organised opposition to its climate-damaging activities.

The Global Climate Coalition (GCC) was formed as soon as the IPCC came into being and, as the name suggests, this was an industry-funded powerhouse designed to undermine any global coalition to prevent climate change.

Bolin notes: “The strategy pursued was primarily to minimise the significance of the possible impacts of climate change and to address procedural and legal issues.”

The majors would engage with the issue more quickly than some of the environmental campaign groups.

The British and American oil industry, including British Petroleum, Shell, Exxon and Esso, were already members of the American Petroleum Institute, which in turn formed the GCC in 1989.

The new alliance included the Edison Electric Institute association of American energy companies, alongside national associations representing farming, paper production, iron manufacture, lorry drivers, rail companies and mining associations.

Energy Heavyweights

Glen Kelly, the executive director, would write to the US government introducing the industry group: “The GCC was formed in 1989 to [facilitate] the participation of US business and industry in the domestic and international policy debates.”

“We are accredited as an NGO to the UK Framework Convention on Climate Change and actively have been involved in every stage of the international negotiations over climate policy since the very beginning of the debate.”

The coalition would, through its member associations, represent more than six million American companies, making it “the largest and longest-serving American business coalition in the debate”.

The most energy-intensive industries based in the world’s most dominant economic nations would directly and openly use their weight to influence the climate debate.

The GCC was purpose-built to negotiate with the US government, but it was less well suited to convincing the American public that global warming did not need urgent action, because it was made up of oil majors and heavy industry polluters.

William O’Keefe of the American Petroleum Institute was instrumental in creating the GCC. He also worked with Hayek-inspired free market think tanks, including serving as chief executive of the George C Marshall Institute.

Rising Tide

According to professor Naomi Oreskes, an American historian of Science, the institute had previously focused on defending Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, but with the end of the Cold War it needed a new enemy and decided to target “environmental alarmists”.

William Nierenberg, who founded the Marshall Institute, was given the opportunity to present its first report on climate change, called Global Warming: What Does The Science Tell Us, to White House staff as early as 1989.

Stephen Schneider, the eminent Stanford University climate scientist said: “Sununu is holding up the report like a cross to a vampire, fending off greenhouse warming.”

Big Oil was making billions in profits from the extraction and sale of fossil fuels and would not go down without an almighty fight.

The most obvious and significant obstacle was the British and American public, who had little sympathy for multinational companies who were already the villains in a rising tide of environmentalism.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Numbers of mountain hares on moorland sites decreased by nearly five percent every year from 1954 to 1999. The scale of the decline increased dramatically to over 30 percent every year from 1999 to 2017, leading to counts in 2017 of less than one percent of original levels in 1954.

The Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the RSPB have analysed counts of mountain hares from six decades of consistent spring counts on moorland managed for red grouse shooting.

This long-term moorland decline is likely to be due to land use changes such as the loss of grouse moors to conifer forests, and is reflective of wider population declines that mountain hares are facing across their range.

Conservation concern

The dominant land use in these sites was intensive grouse moor management.

In order to benefit red grouse, the unregulated practice of hare culling as a form of disease control has become part of the management of many estates since the 1990s, despite the absence of evidence that it has any beneficial impact on total numbers of grouse shot.

On higher, alpine sites the numbers of mountain hares fluctuated greatly, but increased overall until 2007, and then declined, although not to the unprecedented lows seen on moorland sites.

The mountain hare is the UK’s only native hare and was listed as ‘near threatened’ in a recent review by the Mammal Society, indicating that the species is of conservation concern in the UK.

Extraordinary data

Dr Adam Watson, of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, who was lead author of the work, commented: “Having counted mountain hares across the moors and high tops of the eastern Highlands since 1943, I find the decline in numbers of these beautiful animals both compelling and of great concern.

“We need the Scottish Government and Scottish Natural Heritage to take action to help these iconic mammals of the hill – I hope they will listen to the voice of scientific research.”

Professor Jeremy Wilson, RSPB’s head of conservation science in Scotland who assisted in analysis of the data, said: “It has been an honour to support Dr Watson in the analysis of his extraordinary long-term data set. 

“These data reveal severe recent declines on grouse moors that are strongly correlated with the start of mountain hare culls for which there is no clear scientific justification. Urgent action is needed if the future conservation status of mountain hares is to be secure.”

Duncan Orr Ewing, head of species and land management at RSPB Scotland said: “The mountain hare is a keystone native species of the Scottish uplands. This authoritative research suggests that we should be very concerned about its population status in its former strongholds.

“We consider that large-scale population reduction culls are both illegal under EU law and unwarranted as a method for controlling grouse disease.

“Management of this species should now be more tightly controlled by Scottish Natural Heritage to safeguard mountain hare populations. We expect this subject to be given thorough consideration by the current independent grouse moor enquiry, which is looking at how grouse moors can be managed sustainably and within the law.”

This Author 

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story was based on a press release from the RSPB Scotland. The study can be read in the Journal of Applied Ecology. 

Large pet reptiles and amphibians that are sold small and cheaply are more likely to be released into the wild, according to a new study published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology.

Non-native species are increasingly recognised as a major threat to biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, and the exotic pet trade is now the dominant pathway by which reptile and amphibian species arrive in their non-native land.

To find out what species were popular pets in the United States, researchers from Rutgers University browsed through major online pet stores and import records from the government (US Fish and Wildlife Service) and obtained information on animal price, size and age at the time of sale.

Ethical or emotional

From 1999 to 2016, 1,722 reptile and amphibian species were involved in the US exotic pet trade; lizards were the group with the most species for sale (739), followed by snakes with 490 species. Species that are imported in high numbers and offered at competitive prices, such as green iguanas and ball pythons, are among the most popular.

The ecologists then compared the species list with previous research and data from a citizen science project that records local sightings of non-native species, to see which species occur as free-living. They found that species, which are commonly sold at low prices, are much more likely to be set free by their owners.

These species, including the boa constrictor and reticulated python, are usually sold as babies but grow very large, or live a long time – over 30 years in the case of the African clawed frog and Russian tortoise.

“It is difficult to unravel why an owner might release their household companion. Impulsive buying decisions without proper research about care requirements could be a reason”, said Oliver Stringham, who led this study as part of his PhD at Rutgers University. “They may underestimate the space and costs needed to keep such animals as they grow into adults.”

“Understandably, some owners may not wish to euthanise their pet for ethical or emotional attachment reasons”, he added.

Nature invaders

Released exotic pets have the potential to spread and become invasive depending on the environment they are released into. They can harm native wildlife through predation, competition for food, and disease transmission.

One example is the invasive Burmese python in the Everglades National Park in Florida. This snake species originates from Southeast Asia and can grow to 5.5 metres in length, which may be why it was released by local pet owners in the 1990s. Since then, its population has increased dramatically and, as a top predator, has caused severe declines of many native mammals and birds.

Release can also be harmful for the exotic pets as many are not equipped to survive in the wild.

The study suggests that providing potential owners with information about the possible negative ecological impacts of releasing an exotic pet as well as a list of safe places to surrender them, including shelters, rehoming initiatives and ‘buy backs’, could avoid future releases.

Co-author Professor Julie Lockwood said: “When it comes to tackling nature invaders, it is best to take a precautionary approach. Stopping an established species from spreading is often not possible, and if at all, very expensive to eradicate. While it might not be possible to fully prevent the release of exotic pets, reducing the number can be an effective way to prevent new species from becoming established and potentially invasive.”

Oliver Stringham and Julie Lockwood (2018) ‘Pet problems: Biological and economic factors that influence the release of alien reptiles and amphibians by pet owners’ is published in the Journal of Applied Ecology on 22 August 2018 and will be available here.

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the British Ecological Society. 

Fences tend to be invisible on satellite images — you won’t see one in the image above, no matter how much you squint. Yet even without the labels, it would be easy to make out where the governments of Norway and Finland built a border fence back in the 1950s. In atlases, countries are different colors, of course. But in real life? How can that be?

The explanation is in the vegetation, says Bruce Forbes, a geoscientist at the University of Lapland in Finland and coauthor of a paper in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources on ways that people are altering ecology in the Arctic.

“Since this is a satellite image, the colors are false,” Forbes first says of this 2001 picture, plucked from the paper. But, he adds, the hues represent real wavelengths of light, some of them invisible to the human eye. And their patterns reveal large differences in the local vegetation that might spell trouble for the future.

Forbes knows what the colors correspond to, since he’s been out in the field many times to check what the satellite data mean and to conduct experiments. The black areas, he explains, are bodies of water.

The red patches are covered in mosses and vascular plants such as grasses, sedges and shrubs — most of them in low-lying wetlands. Brightness reveals vegetation quality: dull red means plants are short, while intense red indicates a certain lushness — usually tall shrubs.

“That really bright-red patch next to the lake north of the fence? That’s the lushest vegetation,” Forbes points out. “Those willow shrubs may reach up to my waist.” In most of the Arctic, willows never make it to full tree size.

Landscape ‘shrubification’

South of the fence, the duller red indicates that most willows in northern Finland aren’t even shrub-sized. They’ve been grazed down to the ground by reindeer, which are present in higher densities in northern Finland than they are on the other side of the fence, in Norway.

But perhaps we shouldn’t weep for the willow, nor rein in the reindeer. Many scientists and environmentalists have expressed concern that rapid climate warming may cause Arctic shrubs to thrive, resulting in a “shrubification” of the landscape.

Such shrubification might give rise to a vicious cycle, Forbes says. Since shrubs are darker than the other Arctic vegetation, they absorb more sunlight. This may cause more snow to melt more rapidly. If that happens, the surface will become even darker, and that could speed up warming even more. Grazing reindeer may help to nip shrubification in the bud, which could slow down local warming trends.

But there’s a problem: Reindeer throughout the Arctic are struggling due to climate change.

“Warmer temperatures mean that the air is more humid,” says Forbes. “This leads to more snowfall, which makes it harder for the reindeer to dig up the lichens they feed on in winter. It might even rain on the snow, which can then freeze over and turn into ice that the reindeer can’t dig through.” This has caused the deaths of tens of thousands of reindeer across the Arctic in recent decades.

And there’s more. In northern Finland, other problems compromise the reindeer’s ability to find food in winter. Again, the satellite image tells the story: Grayish areas on the Finnish side of the fence are mostly bare ground — the lichens gone, trampled by reindeer in the summer when they are dry and brittle and crumble very easily.

Border enforcement

It looks, then, as if the fence has at least protected the lichens of Arctic Norway, by keeping the lichen-stomping reindeer out. But it’s not so simple, Forbes says.

Once upon a time, the reindeer would migrate north and south at will, and would hang around in northern Finland only in the winter. Come summer, they’d head further north to forage in the wetlands on the coast of Norway. The result was that fewer lichens got trampled, both in Finland and Norway.

Then came the building of the fence, part of a 1950s government effort to enforce the borders and compel the local Sámi herders — who used to follow the migrating reindeer — to settle. And so the migration route was blocked.

The most obvious solution might be to remove the fence and allow the reindeer (and herders) to migrate as they traditionally used to. But Forbes thinks that is unlikely to happen: “I’m afraid the border fences are there to stay,” he says.

So what can be done? Forbes believes the Sámi could still help to make reindeer herding more sustainable — if policymakers would consult them more often. And if damage to lichens could be minimized, grazing reindeer might be an eco-friendly way to keep shrubification at bay.

Indeed, some spots where shrubification is on the rise used to have more reindeer herding, and today’s lusher vegetation may be due, in part, to the local disappearance of this traditional way of life. But climate change is also important, as there are changes all across the Arctic.

“Arctic ecosystems change at a fairly glacial pace,” says Signe Normand, an ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and first author of the review article. “They are slow to respond to new conditions and slow to recover when disturbed.” That lag between our actions and their consequences buys some time to intervene, she says. “But it can also make us complacent.”

This Author 

Tim Vernimmen is a freelance journalist based in Antwerp, Belgium. He writes about the science of life. This article was first published on Knowable Magazine. 

Margaret Thatcher’s intellectual love affair with the economist Friedrich von Hayek continued despite divergent views on the importance of science, rationality – and truth.

Margaret Thatcher presented a clear argument before the Royal Society in 1988: The free market economy depended on a sustainable natural ecology. And science provided the necessary knowledge to guide the industry on what would, in fact, be sustainable.

The then-Prime Minister’s argument was based on reason. It was rational to expect her fellow free market ideologues to agree with her simple premise. But it seemed Thatcher’s adherence to science, distilled during her time studying chemistry at Cambridge, was not shared by her philosophical allies.

Fatal conceit 

Friedrich von Hayek, her intellectual mentor, published a truly peculiar book in the same year as Thatcher’s Royal Society speech that attacked the very foundations of intellectual endeavour, reason, science and basic facts, deeming them to be the very enemies of tradition and morality.

Hayek was no longer a professional economist by 1988, at which point he published The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism with the free market-dominated Chicago University.

“I did only incidental work in economics,” he admitted, while his friend and ally, Milton Freidman, confirmed that “the truth of the matter is, he really got out of that side of the business.”

But he was still paranoid about socialism: “The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions,” he wrote.

“Rationalism, empiricism, positivism, and utilitarianism. In such definitions one finds quite explicitly… the declaration of faith of modern science and the philosophy of science, and their declarations of war against moral traditions.

Socialism as a ruse

“These declarations, definitions, and postulates have created the impression that only that which is rationally justifiable, only that which is provable by observational experiment, only that which can be experienced, only that which can be surveyed, deserves belief; that only that which is pleasurable should be acted upon, and that all else must be repudiated… and that our task must be to construct a new morality on the basis of scientific knowledge—usually the new morality of socialism.”

Much of his anger appears to have been a reaction against claims that his free market ideology was nothing but a ruse to fool workers into supporting capitalism.

He complained that his work had been “challenged, even ridiculed, as the selfish excuse of privileged classes”. Hayek returned to his argument, expressed in The Road to Serfdom, that no system could satisfy the multitude desires of the masses.

To support this claim, he seemed to be saying that “facts” that could be manipulated did not exist. “Some hypothetical body of objective fact is no more available to capitalists for manipulating than it is to the managers that socialist would like to replace them. Such objective facts simply do not exist and are unavailable to anyone.”

Hayek’s argument appears to be deeply pessimistic here, viewing the world and his fellow human beings as hostile and irrational. People should not expect to get what they want, and should be happy only to have the chance to reproduce.

Social Darwinism

He argued that capitalism might not be pleasant, or fair, or valid, but that it was necessary. “Our civilisation depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism.”

Civilisation “resulted not from human design or intention but from spontaneity it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove…”.

According to Hayek’s world view, “our desires and wishes are largely irrelevant” and only the continuation of human existence is important. “We can against calamity—strive after what, under favourable conditions, will continue to lead, at least for some time, and in many places, to further increases.”

Perhaps this is what followers of the free market mean when they say humanity will be able to adapt to climate change. The Fatal Conceit appears to have demonstrated something John Maynard Keynes had observed more than 40 years earlier: that Hayek was wrestling with his own conscience and losing.

Absolutely crucial

One interpretation of this book is that Hayek himself believed in his heart that rationalism, empiricism and the rationally justifiable led irresistibly to socialism. He must have been grateful that the Soviet Union offered only totalitarianism and despair while “the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family (and also anti-religion), is not promising”.

Societies have evolved, he went on to suggest, through a form of community-wide natural selection. This “social Darwinism” would have dark echoes of Nazism with its faith in the superior Aryan race.

The apparent chasm between Thatcher’s scientific rationalism and Hayek’s unprovable traditionalism did not, however, affect their friendship.

The prime minister would congratulate the economist on the occasion of his 90th birthday in May 1989. “It is 10 years this week since I was privileged to become prime minister,” she wrote.

“None of it would have been possible without the values and beliefs to set us on the right road and provide the right sense of direction. The leadership and inspiration that your work and thinking gave us were absolutely crucial, and we owe you a great debt.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist, founder of Request Initiative and co-author of Impact of Market Forces on Addictive Substances and Behaviours: The web of influence of addictive industries (Oxford University Press). He tweets at @EcoMontague. This article first appeared at Desmog.uk. 

Greenpeace air pollution campaigners and medical professionals blocked more than 800 Volkswagen staff from entering the company’s head office in Milton Keynes yesterday morning.

Arriving at 7am, they barricaded the entrances with sick bay furniture and set up a diesel pollution clinic outside to offer advice and health checks to staff and members of the public.

Greenpeace is demanding Volkswagen commit to stop producing diesel cars and go 100% electric.

Diesel addiction

Mel Evans, clean air campaigner at Greenpeace, said: “As the UK’s biggest seller of diesel cars, Volkswagen is complicit in an air pollution crisis that’s filling up emergency departments and GP surgeries.

“Volkswagen sold us a lie about diesel being clean. Its diesel addiction is seriously harming people’s health. Volkswagen won’t meet with us and won’t listen. So today we’ve brought the truth about diesel to its doorstep.  

“Volkswagen must face up to its responsibility for deadly air pollution and commit to end diesel production now.”   

Volkswagen sells the most diesel cars in the UK; one in five new diesel cars are VW Group.

More than two-thirds of people believe car companies, like Volkswagen, should be held to account for toxic diesel pollution and be made to contribute to a Clean Air Fund, according to a poll released by Greenpeace today. 

Peaceful blockade

Aarash Saleh, 33, a doctor in respiratory medicine from Manchester, working in London, who was at the protest yesterday, said: “Diesel pollution is causing horrendous suffering across the UK and storing up a lifetime of troubled health for our kids. If you could see it, diesel would be banned tomorrow.” 

The peaceful blockade at VW’s UK head office came as concerns are growing about the health impacts of air pollution.

A recent study found an “absolutely clear” link between episodes of high air pollution and spikes in hospital admissions and visit to GPs.

The impact of air pollution is particularly acute for children. High exposure to polluted air at a young age can cause chronic health problems that last a lifetime, with research showing negative effects for lung function, respiratory issues like asthma and even stunted lung growth. 

Air pollution from cars and vans costs £6 billion in damage to health each year in the UK; equivalent to the entire budget of NHS Wales.

Legal limits

Levels of harmful nitrogen dioxide air pollution in the UK have broken legal limits every year since 2010 – and diesel vehicles are responsible for 90% of toxic NOx coming from roads.

In September 2017 Greenpeace launched the campaign targeting VW’s continued promotion of polluting diesel by blocking a major import route bringing Volkswagen diesel cars into the UK. VW’s global competitors Toyota, Nissan, Volvo and Fiat-Chrysler are already reported to be ending diesel production in Europe.

Volkswagen was caught cheating on emissions tests by using a defeat device designed to reduce emissions in test conditions, but has faced no civil or criminal charges in the UK.

More than 1.2 million vehicles sold in the UK were fitted with this device by VW, designed to mislead the public and push cars which pump out dangerous levels of air pollution onto UK roads.

Volkswagen is now facing the largest group litigation action in UK history, brought by British consumers seeking compensation over the Dieselgate emissions scandal. Affected consumers are still able to join the suit before the 26 October deadline.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a contributing editor for The Ecologist. This story is based on a press release from Greenpeace.