There are now around 1000 beavers living in Great Britain. This is the beginning of a recovery story for a species that was believed to be forever lost from our shores.

How has this happened in the last decade, and is it good news?

Ecological benefits

The Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) was hunted to extinction in the UK around 300-400 years ago. They were hunted as vermin, for their fur, their meat and for their scent glands.

Beavers were last seen in the wild in the UK in the sixteenth century but now more and more landowners are reintroducing the beaver in an attempt to restore ecosystems, mitigate flooding and improve land and water quality. 

The beaver was once an integral part of the UK’s countryside, busily building damns and creating a mosaic of lakes, mires, tarns and boggy places.

Due to their natural behaviour beavers bring an array of benefits to the countryside. They are well-known for their habit of damming streams and by building new dams in different places, the beavers bring a changeable mixture of habitats into the landscape, with streams, pools and bare mud. 

Beaver dams also hold water in dry periods, help to lessen flash-flooding downstream and reduce erosion, improve water quality by holding silt and catch acidic and agricultural run-off.

Beavers dams

The wetlands in which they live are valuable for many other species such as water voles, otters, teals, water shrews and also insects such as craneflies, water beetles and dragonflies, which in turn support fish and insect-eating birds like the spotted flycatcher. 

Through their famous gnawing behavior beavers will naturally ‘coppice’ trees like willow, hazel, rowan and aspen and the regrowth of these trees provides homes for a variety of insects and birds. 

Beavers homes are called lodges and they need water at least a metre deep outside so they can swim in easily and to give protection against predators. So they build dams over 1m high using tree trunks and other vegetation to create these pools. 

Because they prefer to swim, rather than walk, and they like to transport the branches through the water, they create narrow waterways to help with the process. They also use the deep water as a refrigerator to store food over the winter. Beaver dams are temporary structures and generally quite leaky. 

Beavers are herbivores. They eat aquatic plants, grasses, herbaceous plants and shrubs during the summer months and woody plants in winter. They will often store food underwater so that they can access it if the water freezes over in winter.  

Reintroducing beavers

There is a legal requirement to consider restoring beavers to their former range under the EU Habitats Directive and to protect them under the Bern Convention.

There have been more than 200 formal beaver reintroduction projects (plus numerous unofficial releases) in more than 26 European countries and their ecology and management is well-studied. 

Return of the Beaver will take place from 3 – 6 June with Ben Goldfarb, Derek Gow and Richard Brazier. It’s a short residential course and a practical guide for those considering the reintroduction of beavers to their land.

The course will be hosted by University of Exeter, Embercombe and Devon Wildlife Trust

Join us as we delve into the science, the story and the practical implications that surround the reintroduction of this once extinct animal to Great Britain. What do we need to know, what can we learn from others and where do we start?

During the course we will:

– Look at the wider implications, the challenges, the specific ecosystem benefits and the practical considerations when introducing this species back into wilding or managed habitats.

– Explore the current situation in Great Britain as more and more landowners introduce this species in an attempt to restore ecosystems, mitigate flooding and improve land and water quality. 

– Consider the lessons being learnt along the way, how we can share experience, logistics and spread positive impact. W

– Look at how to limit the negative impacts, and how to communicate and get involved in this important work.

– Consider what lessons can be learnt from the study of beavers in the United States, a country much wilder than ours, with wolves, bears, moose and many other species that have been eliminated from our native fauna. What can we learn about the role of beavers in relatively intact US ecosystems as we consider where they might fit in the restoration of ours? 

– Reflect on the longer term benefits for ecosystems and landowners when working alongside this species for several generations – what have been the conflicts and what measures are conservationists in the US now taking to bring back beavers into areas they have yet to colonise?

This course includes a field trip to see Beavers at Derek Gow’s farm.

This Author 

Michelle Dibb lives on Dartmoor and is passionate about the natural world and how humans can live in harmony with nature and with themselves. She loves to put her experience of traditional marketing communications to use in creating national campaigns to awaken public debate and change opinions about the way we live. 

Image: Ben Goldfarb. 

Botswana’s Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism has recently announced that “the Government of Botswana has taken a decision to lift the hunting suspension.”

The country’s new president, Dr Mokgweetsi Masisi, recently hosted a summit in Kasane for five southern African heads of state whose countries are home to roughly half the world’s remaining elephant population.

The purpose was to forge a common regional strategy for elephant conservation in the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA). Though the strategy does not explicitly mention hunting, it paves the way for justifying it. The conference itself was in large part an exercise towards that end.

Consumptive use

Since Masisi took over the reins from Ian Khama – a lone voice in the region against trophy hunting and trading ivory – he has been angling to rescind the hunting moratorium.

Critics suggest that this is an attempt to retain the rural vote for the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) in this year’s elections, as the party has been struggling over the last decade to retain this vital element of the electorate. 

Under the banner of ‘consumptive use’ – the idea that an animal will only be conserved if it is hunted or its parts are traded for cash – hunting was defended at the Kasane Conference as a silver bullet for elephant conservation. Speakers and ministers expounded myths that the world – and most African Elephant range states – have largely turned their backs on.

First, Kitso Mokaila, Botswana’s Minister of Environment and Tourism, claimed that Botswana’s elephant population has surged to 160,000, from 55,000 in 1991. 

This is the subtext for the claim that there are ‘too many elephants.’ But it is false on both fronts.

Carrying capacity

In 1983, Botswana’s elephant population numbered between 70,000 and 75,000. It had certainly not dropped to 55,000 by 1991.

The minister may have done well to consult the latest scientific survey of Northern Botswana, which estimates the population to be roughly 126,114. This is where the majority of elephants reside, so a generous reading of the entire country might be just above 130,000.

This figure is not materially different from the 2014 figure. In other words, the population is stable, not growing. 

A second myth: Botswana has exceeded its ‘carrying capacity’ of 54,000 elephants. 

This has become an expedient cover under which to justify elephant trophy hunting and even culling. The entire concept of ‘carrying capacity’ is arbitrary. It has no relevance for vast, unfenced wilderness landscapes that adapt and maintain integrity without human intervention. 

Ecological benefits 

Ian McDonald has stated that the idea of a carrying capacity of 0.4 elephants per square kilometre derives from an outdated “Hwange Game Reserve management policy that had no scientific basis”.

Scholars Phyllis Lee, Keith Lindsay and Katarzyna Nowak write: “Much of the research community, and many managers, accept that ecosystem structure and function are not about elephant numbers but instead about elephant distribution across a landscape and in relation to plant communities.” 

A large number of scientists wrote in Ambio that they did not see “any ecological reason to artificially change the number of elephants in Chobe National Park, either through culling or opening new dry season ranges.” 

What matters is not “carrying capacity” but dispersion and concentration. A high density of elephants in one area may prove to result in some ‘undesirable’ vegetation transformation, which is a good reason for keeping migratory corridors open (no fences).

Even where apparent vegetation transformation occurs, however, the ecological benefits of keeping elephants as keystone herbivores should never be underestimated. They deposit seeds up to 90km away from areas in which they feed, regenerating vegetation elsewhere and creating corridors for other animals to use. 

Transferring knowledge

A third myth: hunting will solve the “population explosion problem”. Ignoring for a second that the population is stable – and potentially in decline – the truth is that hunting only decimates the big tuskers, reducing genetic diversity.

Trophy hunting is typically rationalised on the grounds that it only eliminates old bulls that are ‘surplus’ to herd requirements. Such small-scale elimination is, however, incapable of controlling an ‘exploding’ population, especially given that Botswana’s annual trophy export quota was only ever between 420 and 800 elephants in the decade preceding the moratorium. 

Moreover, there is no such thing as ‘surplus’ bull elephants. Dr Michelle Henley writes that “in the past, bulls over 50 years of age were considered redundant but more recent studies have found that bulls do not reach their sexual prime until they are over 45 years old.” 

She also notes that older bulls, because they have protracted musth cycles, “often suppress the musth cycles of younger bulls, thereby maintaining social stability and lowering younger bulls’ aggression towards other species such as rhinoceros.” 

They are thus critical for ensuring functional herd sociology, transferring knowledge and disciplining delinquent behaviour among juvenile males.  

Arbitrary quotas

Hunting is a fundamentally unsustainable activity, as the incentives are loaded in favour of over-consumption and rule-breaking.

As Botswana veteran Mike Gunn puts it: “Anyone who knows anything about hunting cannot honestly claim that a hunter, tracking a trophy bull with his client, upon finding a young bull carrying large tusks, would try to dissuade his client from shooting it.” 

Hunting quotas tend to be arbitrarily determined by the hunters themselves and over-exploited, which violates the ‘maximum sustainable yield’ principle. 

Hunting will therefore never solve a population problem, but it does destroy herd sociology and ensures that big tuskers are being shot out.

In this respect, hunters are aiding the poachers – undermining, not supporting, conservation. 

Colonial hunting 

Fourth, it’s simply not true that bringing back hunting will solve human and elephant conflict (HEC) and increase benefits to local communities.

The fact is that hunting would only solve HEC if it were able to keep elephants within protected areas and reduce the scarcity of resources, such as water, especially during prolonged drought.

Part of the argument is that hunting generates revenue that accrues directly to local communities and thus disincentivises both poaching and the killing of errant crop-raiders. Ironically, however, hunting is rooted in a colonial anthropology that castigated indigenous people groups as ‘poachers’ and colonialists as ‘hunter-conservationists’.

So, the colonial hunting fraternity established fortress conservation, which displaced and disempowered local communities, but now paints itself as the saviour of conservation and communities. 

HEC can be mitigated through bee and chilli solutions, or some combination thereof. Safe migratory corridors can also be established in which human settlement is limited.

Marginal lands

Ultimately, if communities are empowered to earn and receive benefits from elephants being alive, HEC might become negligible. Hunting is not the answer, as the global hunting industry is in decline and is fundamentally unsustainable in open systems.

While the hunting lobby argues that photography is not viable in ‘marginal lands’, Mike Gunn reports that the establishment of Thobolo’s Bush Lodge has falsified this hypothesis.

Hunting makes elephants skittish and herds them, in large numbers, into small safe areas. To the contrary, photography-based lodges present no threat to elephants, provide water during drought, and therefore allow dispersion that results in reasonable population growth and broad-based revenue for communities that would otherwise be reliant on dwindling hunting income.

Instead of allocating previous hunting concessions to photographic, non-consumptive businesses, the Botswana government has been accused of sitting on them despite high levels of interest. Idle land is an invitation to poachers. 

The bottom line here is that hunting tends to increase elephant aggression, which exacerbates HEC instead of resolving it.  

Poaching

A fifth myth: the hunting moratorium led to increased poaching.

This argument only works on confirmation bias and sequence ignorance. The logic is that poaching has increased in the wake of hunting’s absence, and the latter must therefore be the cause of the former.

However, poaching only started to increase in 2017, three years after the moratorium was imposed. Poaching is therefore more likely to be a function of scarcity elsewhere – south-western Zambia and south-eastern Angola have experienced high poaching rates recently – and density within. It’s no surprise that poachers have moved south.

Moreover, poaching may well have been minimised if former hunting concessions had been re-allocated timeously to allow photographic expansion. 

In the final analysis, Botswana appears intent on moving against science and cogent argument through lifting Khama’s hunting moratorium.

Ecological integrity 

As a physical emblem of President Masisi’s rejection of the prevailing global view, he gifted his fellow heads of state at the Kasane conference with elephant footstools.

A UN report released at the same time as the conference showed that human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems. No less than one million species are at risk of extinction, in large part because of our unsustainable ‘consumptive-use’ doctrine.

While the rest of the world takes stock of the implications of having destroyed the planet, Botswana has now committed to a policy built on myths, one that may generate short-term revenue and political gain.

But it comes at the expense of elephants, ecological integrity and future eco-tourism revenue.    

This Author 

Ross Harvey studied a B.Com in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Cape Town (UCT), where he also completed an M.Phil in Public Policy. At the end of 2018, he submitted his PhD in Economics, also at UCT. Ross is currently a freelance independent economist who works with The Conservation Action Trust.

Follow him on Twitter: @Harvross

Labour’s left-wing grassroots are finally on the front foot. Momentum are now backing party conference motions that would see Labour adopt a radical Green New Deal as official party policy.

Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are spearheading a radical new policy agenda to reshape Britain from the bottom up.

The history of Corbynism so far has been of defending the left’s control of the party. In 2015, the journey began with Corbyn’s election as party leader to the surprise of the political establishment. In 2016, his supporters organised to fend off the ‘chicken coup’ ending with Owen Smith’s failed leadership challenge.

Radical platforms

In 2017, Momentum members helped cement Corbyn’s authority with a defiant general election result overturning Theresa May’s parliamentary majority. The political tide has turned within Labour, but much of the party’s plans for government are yet to match the ambitions that drove Corbyn’s rise to power.

In policy terms, members remain ahead of the leadership’s stated positions on key areas such as climate, migration, work, ownership and foreign policy. We can see this in the Labour for a Green New groups sprouting across the country, demonstrating the enthusiasm for radical policy platforms.

The motion that Labour for a Green New Deal groups will put to Labour Party conference in September crucially places the necessary target of a zero-carbon society by 2030 in the context of a socialist, internationalist platform to transform the whole economy. The motion is clear that without both, we’ll achieve neither.

Members’ ambition is not just for Labour to adopt the Green New Deal as framing. The principles of the Green New Deal must flow deeply through Labour’s entire manifesto and vision for transforming society. Beyond merely rolling back Tory austerity and introducing limited services, the climate crisis commands a total rewiring of the economy. And it’s given us a hard deadline of 2030.

Privatisation and the market have failed to transition our economy away from fossil fuels because profit got in the way. That’s why we need a green industrial revolution expanding public, democratic ownership across the whole economy.

Labour for a Green New Deal’s motion calls for large-scale investment and regulation to accelerate the transition to renewables while dismantling a rigged economy.

Climate justice

Too often the cruel threat of job losses has been made to workers demanding transition. That’s why Labour for a Green New Deal’s motion calls for a just transition to well-paid, unionised, green jobs available for all.

Green jobs are not just engineers building wind farms or insulating homes, vital though they are. Green jobs are any zero-carbon job which contributes to delivering universal basic services providing for everybody’s needs: teachers, nurses, social and care workers, bus drivers, farmers and chefs.

There can also be no climate justice in one country alone. Any effective response to the climate crisis must be global in scope.

We need an internationalist Green New Deal. That means the UK meeting its responsibilities from historic emissions by transferring finance, skills and capacity to the Global South to support a global just transition.

It means ending neocolonial plunder of the metals and minerals needed to green our energy at home while leaving the rest of the world for dead.

Growing confidence 

Over recent weeks there have been Green New Deal events in Sheffield, Bristol, London, Oxford, Scarborough and Newcastle. At each one, there has been palpable energy among Labour members for a transformative program binding radical climate and economic justice together.

Decades of austerity-environmentalism has turned people away from questions of climate. The Green New Deal’s promise of revitalising left-behind communities is getting people excited. All of this is beyond Labour’s current position, but it is the logical conclusion of the politics behind the party’s existing plans for a more limited ‘green industrial revolution’.

Corbyn’s leadership has above all else created the political space in Labour for these meaningful conversations over policy and strategy. Corbyn, John McDonnell and Rebecca Long-Bailey regularly call for pressure from below to push them further, particularly on climate.

Luckily, through vehicles like Labour for a Green New Deal, members are growing in confidence to make the most of this space. They are a necessary counter-weight to established, and often reactionary, interests who are already confident exerting their influence over Labour’s leaders.

Last year saw anti-Brexit campaigners maximise the potential of Party Conference to shift the party’s position on the possibility of a second referendum. This year, grassroots campaigns like Labour for a Green New Deal, with the backing of Momentum, will set the agenda at Conference and beyond.

After years of defending basic policy positions, 2019 is the year of Corbynism 2.0 – a renaissance of ideas, ambition and strategy bursting up from the grassroots. A radical Green New Deal which responds to recent declarations of climate emergency will be its centrepiece.

This Author 

Chris Saltmarsh is co-director of climate change campaigns at People & Planet, and co-founder of Labour for a Green New Deal. He tweets at @chris_saltmarsh. This story was first published on openDemocracy. 

Image: Ben Birchall/PA Wire/PA Images.

Greta Thunberg and her student comrades have called for adults to join them in a world-wide #Strike4Climate on Friday September 20. This is a beginner’s guide to what you can do to help make that strike bigger. And we’re all beginners here. Our species has never organized a global strike.

I am deeply grateful that I should have lived long enough to see this moment. I have spent my adult life in trade unions, and helped organize many strikes, persuading my workmates out the door.

Between 2006 and 2009 I was international secretary for the British Campaign against Climate Change and helped coordinate global climate demonstrations each year. One year, 2009, we had demonstrations on the same day in 52 countries. Here, I draw on my experience, and I draw on insane hope too.

Look at the photos of the student strikes from around the world, month after month, and you can see the numbers grow. Look at the homemade placards too. In the early walkouts they are about polar bears and heat.

Now they talk also about climate jobs, a green new deal and system change. The call for adults to join in is a new step. Out of the shadows and confusion, we can see a new power emerging that may be able to rescue life on our planet.

Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and many other adults I admire have written an open letter calling on adults to respond to the students. It’s a wonderful letter. However, there’s one bit I would put differently. They say that some people won’t be able to afford to strike. And, they say, some employers won’t let them.

But most people fall somewhere in the middle on that continuum. The boss is a problem, money is a problem, but you can still dare to strike. This article is about how to persuade the people in-between to act.

Why Strikes Matter

The student strikes have changed the conversation about climate. That’s not just because they demonstrated. It’s because they went on strike. Greta and the rest understand that.

That is why they use the word strike again and again. It’s why they have called on the rest of us to come out on a Friday. To break the discipline of work, to take the emergency seriously and answer a higher call.

A student strike is collective defiance. So is an adult strike. A strike is different from a demonstration because people act together to defy the people who have authority over them – teachers and employers.

They act against the aspects of their lives which are least democratic and most resistant to change. When you are part of a majority who defy power, this has an enormous emotional charge.

The collective defiance of a strike is important for the future too. The people who run our world have not acted on climate change. They know what is happening, but to preserve profits, they have chosen not to act.

To make them act we will need power as great as theirs. We have two powers, the vote and the strike. Both powers are great because they depend on majorities, and we need both to stop climate breakdown. A big strike will tell everyone that the ordinary people are on the move.

Moral Authority

Persuading people to strike in a union workplace is not easy. It’s even harder with no union and a bullying management. But this time is different for two important reasons. We are defending the future of all living things. And we are responding to the immense moral authority of our children and grandchildren.

Those two things give us moral standing. Think about the kind of employer you have. Do Starbucks, United Airlines, the hospital or the school want to be on television news and social media sacking people for marching with the children?

No, they don’t. They may well threaten you, workplace by workplace. But once it looks like the strike will be big, they will probably back down.

Find a Friend

Every one of the school strikes all over the world happened because a small group of organisers inside the school persuaded their friends and classmates to act. You have not heard their names, and do not see them, which is part of how they do it.

Grassroots workplace organisation will be even more important on September 20. Everyone is frightened at work, with reason. That’s how capitalism works. Building a strike is a process. It takes time.

We have to build confidence on our side and reduce the confidence of the employers. If people are fearful, they will book annual leave in ones and twos. If people are confident in each other, they will come out in tens, hundreds and thousands.

The first and most important step is find one other person at work who thinks the way you do. Then talk with them about what to do. You need that person because you will be frightened and scared of losing your job.

But there is always another kind of fear looming over us at work, creating anxiety. It is a generalised fear of provoking authority. So finding that first friend is important. They need you too. You can do it this week.

Meetings are important too – first the two of you, then in fours and fives, then twenty or a hundred in a room. The key thing is not what is said. It is that those people have come together, and in the act of entering the same room they gain courage from each other.

Have the meeting in a break room, maybe in a pub or a fast food joint or a park or someone’s home. It depends where you feel safe.

Have a real discussion with those first four or five people who want to join in. Take turns talking, listen carefully to what everyone says. If you’re political, don’t try to make them to do what you think is best, do what they collectively think is best.

The most important thing is not what you do, it’s that you are doing something together.

Whether you have a union on not, you don’t tell people they ought to be brave. Instead, you ask how many of us do we need to take action carefully? Ten, or twenty or forty? What you need is for someone to say: ‘I’ll come out if there are twenty others up for it.’

There is more to say about workplace organising, but first let’s think about organising via networks outside work.

Networks and Examples

From the start, there are many ways you can use networks outside work to encourage yourself and people you work with.

We have just under four months. The great majority of groups who decide to join the strike or the marches will make that decision in the last three weeks. Very few groups will decide on action quickly. But those who do will be very important, because we can tell others of their example.

Some workplaces will be easier than others. It may be easier if you work in a global development charity, or an environmental agency workplace, a union headquarters, a wind turbine factory, a radical website or some other group of committed people.

Maybe you’re a teacher in a school where the students have already been on strike. If you can get a quick decision on action, it will stand as a beacon for everyone.

Most of us can’t do that. But we can spread the word of the first group of workers in Britain to declare for action, or the first teachers in Portugal, the first group in Silicon Valley, the first nurses in your city or the first national church anywhere in the world. The more examples, the bigger the wave.

Timing is everything, at work and between workplaces. The ripples of June will become the tsunamis of September. But mass action on the 20th will not come without the initial meetings of four people in the pub in the coming six weeks.

There are all kinds of networks you can use. If you go to church, mosque or synagogue, bring it up there. If your church, or just some people from your church, agree to help each other join in the strike, it will make all of you stronger, and spread the idea to other workplaces.

‘I want a day of unpaid leave to join my church group at the children’s climate strike,’ is a strong sentence.

You can just call up your friends and have a few people over to your house to talk about the strike, and what you can do.

Bird watching groups are important. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds mobilized the largest number of people for the biggest climate march we ever had in Britain. But again, just an informal chat at the end of an afternoon birding can kick-start a miracle.

Whenever you have a meeting, even five people, see if you can get a school striker to come. You probably know someone whose fourteen-year-old child walked out. Ask that teenager please to come. She does not have to be expert. But her moral authority will transform the room.

Also, if there has been a school walkout near you, then you are surrounded by experienced organisers. They know more than you – not because they’re younger, but because they’ve done it already. Ask them for advice.

Those schoolkids have big networks. The parents of the students are proud of them. Get the kids to put you in contact with their parents. Have small parents’ meetings and big ones. Have meetings in people’s houses where people invite their relatives.

Try chatting to other people at your queer bar on Friday night. When you find two friends who are into it, suggest organising an informal fundraiser. Book clubs are golden. Maybe you belong to a network of feminists in tech. Model railway clubs are good – we need a return to rail to stop climate change.

Yoga. Buddhists. Football teams. Rugby clubs. Mother and baby club. Local history societies. Count up the networks you know. Start where you feel most comfortable. But think big and dare to face embarrassment.

If possible, try to get meetings in your town to bring together potential activists. If you don’t know how to do that, you know someone who does.

In a big city, you can have specialist meetings too. A meeting for student nurses in London, transit workers in New York, musicians in Austin, scientists in Cape Town, and so on.

Make sure you invite a wide variety of people. Don’t let one organisation dominate the meeting. Give everyone a chance to speak. The people who come will take the spirit of those meetings back to dozens of workplaces.

Talk, Talk, Talk

Every step of the way, everyone working for the strike is talking, talking, talking. Not the political rhetoric of social movements or the comments on social media. You hang in there with every conversation. Treat everyone with respect.

You are not mainly trying to win an argument about climate. People already hear those arguments. You are trying to help a group of people be braver. At base that’s what’s wrong with the world and the precondition of every inequality – we the people are more afraid than they are. And with reason, they have the big guns on their side.

Respect people’s fears and hesitations. Don’t tell them they’re cowards or don’t care enough about their grandchildren. We all feel small enough already. That’s the problem.

We have to be brave and passionate to build a global strike. But if people see you take stupid risks, they won’t trust or follow you. And if you get fired, everyone at work will be more frightened.

One reason people will give for not striking is they cannot afford it. I do wish Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein had not said that. Because in every country in every period, the majority of strikers have been people with little money. That’s who built unions. If people with low incomes are not going to change the world, it’s not going to change.

Some people will be worried about possible violence or arrests on any demonstration. That’s what they see on television. Reassure them. The student strikes and other union marches are not like that.

Another reason people will give for not taking part is that it won’t make any difference, and we won’t win with a one-day walkout. This is a serious consideration. One day strikes have become a strategy adopted by unions which feel themselves weak. They are usually a recipe for defeat. But this time is different.

One half is that a big global strike, even only one day, will make everyone in the world who wants to save the Earth more confident, simply because we have never done anything like that before.

The other half is just as important. A big global strike, for one day, even by tens of millions, may well be enough to get more governments to declare a climate emergency. But it will not be enough to make governments act decisively. So don’t happy talk. It’s going to be a hard road. But this is how we start.

Read up on climate jobs and green new deals. There are some links at the end of this article. Don’t insist that people agree with your views. But if they ask what’s your alternative, be prepared.

Another thing – people always surprise you in strikes. A deep green will refuse to do anything. A racist will stand with you. Happens every time. Presume nothing.

Finally, when the talking is done, you have a bigger meeting. And there perhaps you decide to strike, or for some of you to walk out together, or to send a delegation. Whatever the decision, you have made history and prepared the ground for the strikes to come.

Political Parties

If you’re in a party, good. If not, maybe go to a meeting anyway. The minimum you want is a mention of the global climate strike on September 20, and an informal discussion afterwards. Whatever else, you find a few people who will want to get on board.

But if you’re in a party, think big too. If Caroline Lucas and the Green Party all around Britain have strike rally after rally, they will double the Green vote in the next election. If Corbyn does that, he will pull the Labour Party back together. Doing that could transform the chances of Bernie Sanders or the Democratic Socialists of America.

Maybe you’re not in a party. But you are gutted after the elections in Britain, Italy, India, Brazil or Australia. You are confronting the prospect of a world dominated by bullies and racists. What makes it hurt worse is that some ordinary people like you voted for Trump, Putin, Modi, Duterte and the rest. You want to cry and not stop crying.

But the new right are not just misogynist and racist. They are the prisoners of fossil fuels. Remember how the women’s marches, the school anti-gun walkouts and #MeToo have weakened Trump. Look how the student and teacher education strikes in Brazil have weakened Bolsonaro. This is how you get up off the floor.

Unions

If you have a union, great. Talk to you union rep and branch from the start. Unions are sometimes a miracle of solidarity. But unions have suffered many defeats in recent years, and some have grown timid. Maybe you’ll get a knock back at first. Maybe they’ll tell you a strike would be illegal. So what? No one is going to be fined or imprisoned for a climate strike. Not in this real world.

Often unions are under pressure from the top of the movement not to do too much, but the union leaders dare not say that. So they mention other difficulties. In that situation, the four or five of you keep talking, keep building support, and take all those people back to a union meeting.

Make it clear to the union reps that you will act anyway. Probably they will come over to you. If not, you may still win over the union meeting.

Some local and national union leaders will seize the time. They will remember this: the women and men who first built our unions did so because they wanted to change the world. A new passion can do more than rebuild unions. It can change the balance of power between corporations and workers across the world.

For those of us who are union deep in our hearts, this is our moment.

Greta Thunberg and the others are urging us to understand that there should be no more pleading for the powerful to grant us a just transition. No more standing on the sidelines commenting. This is our territory. We know strikes. What we do now matters to everyone.

A simple truth stares everyone in the face. The rich, powerful carbon elite are not going to save the Earth. It is up to us ordinary people to do it for ourselves and for all living things. This is our time. Eyeballs out.

This Author

Jonathan Neale is a writer, climate activist and trade unionist, the author of A People’s History of the Vietnam War and Stop Global Warming, and the editor of One Million Climate Jobs. He blogs at Anne Bonny Pirate.

Resources

https://www.campaigncc.org/sites/data/files/Docs/one_million_climate_jobs_2014.pdf

http://aidc.org.za/download/climate-change/OMCJ-booklet-AIDC-electronic-version.pdf

Wildfires that ravaged millions of hectares of forest in Russia in 2018 were likely to have been caused by humans, according to analysis carried out by mapping experts at Greenpeace.

More than 15 million hectares in Russia were burnt due to wildfires in 2018 – an area almost twice the size of the Republic of Ireland, according to official data.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists at Greenpeace used remote sensing data to analyse four regions of Siberia totalling more than 3.9 million square kilometres that have been the most badly hit by wildfires.

They found that the “overwhelming majority” of the fires started close to places where people travel, work or live, or to sites where “prescribed burnings” took place.

Burnings

This is where small fires are started deliberately to reduce vegetation in order to prevent any wildfires getting out of control. The practice – used worldwide – is controversial as some argue that it damages biodiversity while not preventing dangerous wildfires.

In one area studied, Amur Oblast, around a quarter of the fires identified – with a burned area of 2.8 million hectares – were spatially linked to areas where the forestry service had conducted prescribed burnings.

The analysts said that this indicated that the prescribed burnings “either caused fires, or did not fulfil their intended function, which is to prevent the burning of dry forests”.

While Greenpeace acknowledged that evidence of human activity close to the starting point of a wildfire does not conclusively prove it was started by humans, the campaign group argues that it does indicate a high probability that it was – particularly in very sparsely-populated regions.

To read more about the analysis, see this interactive map by Greenpeace.

This Author

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

What could speak more powerfully about this critical moment in time than the deaths of at least five climbers on the final approach ridge to the summit of Chomolungma*.

The climbers died because they were queuing. Shuffling in two directions, past bodies and cadavers, on the same rope to the Instagram opportunity at the top, sometimes waiting up to twelve hours in the deliberately labelled ‘death zone’ for their selfie moment.

People are queuing to conquer – and dying in the descent.

Pushing limits

I was instantly reminded of the harrowing footage in the recent Netflix ‘Our Planet’ series of the walruses in north west Russia tumbling to their brutal deaths from rocky clifftops.

The retreat of sea ice due to climate change is forcing tens of thousands of walruses onto already overcrowded islands, the only respite from the agitated mass of bodies, the deadly precipices above. The walrus’s poor eyesight above water dooms them to a lethal plunge. 

The walruses have no choice. But we do. 

Summiting Everest is the ultimate in mountaineering achievement. It has now been done by almost 10,000 people.

Fatalities often occur when climbers push themselves beyond their physical limits in a desperate push to reach the top, or more frequently on the way down through exhaustion, lack of oxygen or punishing changes in weather once a ‘window’ closes. Or because they’re stuck in a logjam of fellow climbers. 

Commercial expeditions

It’s a cult of individualism. Paying punters increase the pressure for guides to ‘deliver’ the promised experience (climbing the mountain costs tens of thousands of pounds). The slopes are now littered with bodies, over 200 of the 300 who have died at altitude remain on the mountain, alongside the tonnes of debris and detritus from multiple commercial expeditions. 

This once pristine pinnacle on the roof of the world is now tarnished by the single-minded pursuit of individual experience, as ‘customers’ are putting both themselves and other climber’s lives at risk, and leaving a trail of filth in their wake in what should be a wild and wonderful place. ‘Me’ triumphs over ‘others’ and nature. 

I completely get the human desire to explore and the extreme. ‘The Worst Journey In The World’ about the ill-fated Scott Polar Expedition is one of my favourite travel books, and I was gripped by Alex Honnold’s ‘Free Solo’ as he scampered up El Capitan’s sheer face without a rope to be seen.

These are both, for different reasons, vivid testament to human curiosity, tenacity, skill and endurance. But when you are the 10,000th person to achieve something it’s all about you, not about us and our collective pushing of boundaries as a species. 

Consumer mindset

Everest’s life-threatening bottle-neck is repeated in other perhaps less ‘heroic’ travel and tourism.

Macchu Piccu’s proposed new airport will bring a vast increase in travelers to the Inca stronghold. Venice’s lagoon may now be flood protected, but not from the rising tide of visitors threatening to swamp the city. Approaching 30m visitors a year, Italy’s floating city could lose it’s last native resident by 2030 on current trends. The list goes on. 

What happens when that which we seek to experience is damaged or even destroyed by that very seeking? What happens when the things we want to acquire beyond needs have terrible consequences for everyone?

We are approaching adventure and travel with the same ‘consumer’ mindset that drives our destructive materialism. This conquering and acquisitive mentality is the result of a conditioned mindset of consumption.

The prioritisation of individualism. The primacy of firsthand experience over vicarious value and appreciation, no matter the wider costs. The disconnection from a greater sense of self that is expansive.

Privileged few

This selfishness is why we talk about climate inequality as the ‘champagne glass’ distribution in which the top 10 percent of population emit almost 50 percent of the global carbon.

A small minority that guzzles vast amounts of the collective pie is what is driving us to the brink, not the relatively modest lifestyles of the bottom 4B people on the planet. 

We could all admire this wonderful world from our own distance and perspective, in the same way that generations of Tibetans and Nepalese admired Everest without once ever feeling the need to climb the bloody thing.

It is increasingly possible for everyone to enjoy everything, even if by proxy. Or we can allow the rash and privileged few to climb above us all, and not give a toss who dies on the way down. 

This Author

Ed Gillespie is the author ‘Only Planet’. Follow him on Twitter , LinkedIn , Facebook  and Instagram.

*Chomolungma is the Tibetan name for the mountain we call Everest, that means ‘Goddess Mother of the World’. Its Sanskrit name is ‘Sagarmatha’ which translates literally as ‘Peak of Heaven’.

This month has brought scary news for the 3,000 workers at Scunthorpe British Steel plant, and a feeling of incoming doubt and dread for the 29,000 others working in steel in the rest of the country. 

Tata Steel, the biggest manufacturer in the industry in the UK, is currently feeling doubts after a rescue operation merger with German giant, Thyssenkrupp, was blocked by the European Commission. This is further worry for its UK plants, which have been up for sale since 2016. 

British Steel, which currently sits in second place, has attributed its quick and recent decline to the cost of raw materials and the falling and uncertain value of the pound. 

Pollution

A not-insignificant part of their money troubles has come from pollution bills. In April, the government loaned the firm £100m to pay an EU carbon debt, after free carbon permits for UK companies were taken away during Brexit discussions. 

Steel and iron account for 4-7 percent of global CO2 emissions. But it’s not just carbon. Manufacturing steel is a heavily polluting process. SOx, NOx, PM2 are all released into the air, along with the major waste product pollutant coke. 

Scunthorpe, British Steel’s biggest site, is the second most polluted town in the UK. Port Talbot, Tata Steel’s biggest site, is first. 

Dealing with metal ore waste products (‘slag’) is also a challenge. DEFRA has fined the steel industry 47 times since 2000. Coming face-to-face with these toxins and remains cannot be pleasant or healthy for the factories’ employees.

However, the argument often heard is that, living in towns built for steelwork, they simply know no other profession.

Transitioning jobs

All that Michael Gove, the environment secretary and Conservative party leader contender, has said of this situation is that it is a ‘very difficult’ one. But might there be hope for a post-steel UK? 

Transition programs for more climate-friendly manufacturing jobs, such as solar and wind, have shown a lot of potential in similar industries, like coal.

A ‘just transition’ for workers in negatively-impacting industries has been on the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP’s agenda for a few years, as consumer habits and regulations naturally shift to be more environmentally-aware. 

Reflecting this, many green businesses are seeing year-on-year boosts to their revenue – today the UK cycling industry is worth three times more, and employs twice as many people as UK steel does. And the ‘environmental sector’ is expected to grow: at about five percent per year according to the OECD. They estimate its current worth at $250 billion.

Moreover, movements like these in steelwork have been experienced before. The workforce today is a tenth of the size that it was 50 years ago, when it was responsible for almost a third of a million jobs. 

Manufacturing elsewhere

So what about the result for steel manufacture itself?

Tata, HQ’d in India, will inevitably move more of their manufacturing operations there. They have said that the planned merger was to allow for more sustainable operations to continue, but that now they will have to ‘look at more options.’

China and India are respectively first and second largest for steel manufacturing in the world – they will surely take on more of the demand. China already produces 51 percent of the world’s steel. Problematically, steel is the heaviest source of pollution of harmful toxins by the Chinese, though regulations have this month been put in place to address this by 2025.

Six years ago, India was ranked fifth in the world. This year it took Japan’s second place spot and is growing. Worldwide, steel output is increasing year on year, expected to go up more than seven percent in 2019 and 2020.

Contrary to how it may seem in the UK, steel production isn’t slowing down, it’s moving out of developed countries and into developing ones. But these countries – which include Russia, Turkey and South Korea (though by a far smaller margin to China and India) – have significantly lower environmental standards and regulations than the UK, Japan and EU, all of whose output is falling. 

Better regulations 

The results are apparent to the people closest to the situation: 60 percent of steel and iron workers in India were found to be suffering with an occupational morbidity, often due to exposure to chemicals and toxins that they ought to be protected from. 

Naturally, air emissions and waste disposal from metal ore handling can be extremely damaging to the local environments and wildlife, if not dealt with to the best degree possible.

Energy use is also a big factor in environmental concerns over steel manufacture moving elsewhere. China uses about recycled scrap steel for about 18 percent of its input.

Compare this to Europe, where about half of all materials used for steel production is recycled scrap due to the well-regulated and committed recycling market there. This has been the biggest factor in EU halving its energy usage for steel in the last 50 years.

More doubt and confusion will be thrown up for UK after Brexit, but perhaps what is most worrying is a world economy where more and more industries will be shifting to places where it’s easier, cheaper, and more harmful to do business. 

This Author 

Laura Mahler is an environmental researcher and documentary filmmaker. She is founder of non-profit production company @filmthechange and has presented both her award-winning academic work and films internationally. 

The twin crises of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss are the most serious issue of our time.

Buildings and construction play a major part in that crisis, accounting for nearly 40 percent of energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions whilst also having a significant impact on our natural habitats. 

For everyone working in the construction industry, meeting the needs of our society without breaching the earth’s ecological boundaries will demand a paradigm shift in our behaviour. Together with our clients, we will need to commission and design buildings, cities and infrastructures as indivisible components of a larger, constantly regenerating and self-sustaining system. 

Collective will 

The research and technology exist for us to begin that transformation now, but what has been lacking is collective will.

Recognising this, we are committing to strengthen our working practices to create architecture and urbanism that has a more positive impact on the world around us. 

We will seek to: 

• Raise awareness of the climate and biodiversity emergencies and the urgent need for action amongst our clients and supply chains;
• Advocate for faster change in our industry towards regenerative design practices and a higher Governmental funding priority to support this;
• Establish climate and biodiversity mitigation principles as the key measure of our industry’s success: demonstrated through awards, prizes and listings;
• Share knowledge and research to that end on an open source basis;
• Evaluate all new projects against the aspiration to contribute positively to mitigating climate breakdown, and encourage our clients to adopt this  approach;
• Upgrade existing buildings for extended use as a more carbon efficient alternative to demolition and new build whenever there is a viable choice. 
• Include life cycle costing, whole life carbon modelling and post occupancy  evaluation as part of our basic scope of work, to reduce both embodied and operational resource use.
• Adopt more regenerative design principles in our studios, with the aim of designing architecture and urbanism that goes beyond the standard of net zero carbon in use.
• Collaborate with engineers, contractors and clients to further reduce construction waste. 
• Accelerate the shift to low embodied carbon materials in all our work. 
• Minimise wasteful use of resources in architecture and urban planning, both in quantum and in detail. 

We hope that every UK architectural practice will join us in making this commitment. 

These Authors

The open letter above was signed by: 

AL_A
Alison Brooks Architects
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris Caruso St John
David Chipperfield Architects dRMM
Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios Foster + Partners
Haworth Tompkins
Hodder + Partners
Maccreanor Lavington
Michael Wilford
Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners Stanton Williams WilkinsonEyre
Witherford Watson Mann
Zaha Hadid Architects 

To follow this campaign please visit the website or search #architectsdeclare on Twitter. 

Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) was a slogan in search of a movement, and now it has its manifesto. The aim: to accelerate capitalism’s positives (technological progress), curb its negatives (neoliberal globalisation), and to re-invent communism for the coming Age of Affluence.

Aaron Bastani’s overriding concern is climate breakdown. Anything over a 2°C rise “could be cataclysmic, creating a cascade of feedbacks” that would accelerate global heating and the sixth mass extinction. The glaciers that provide drinking water for billions are evaporating, nine-tenths of the largest fish in the oceans have disappeared, and soils are suffering from industrial farming and salination.

Although “humanity’s rise” was built on agriculture and on our “unique ability to reprogram the gifts of nature,” the planet’s natural limits are now being trampled with such violence that the prospect of human extinction begins to appear plausible. Our present course is worse than inaction. It is “rushing full speed to oblivion”. We have a window of ten or twenty years.

How does Bastani propose we use that window? For starters, we need to recognise that it’s “the meat and dairy consumption typical to diets of the Global North which have us living beyond our ecological means”. Animal products are a “highly inefficient way of using finite resources to produce food”. Ideally, we should completely eliminate them from our diets.

But even as this recognition dawns, the solution is arriving, in the shape of lab-grown meat, eggs and dairy products. This is the next glittering chapter of the Green Revolution, that “most important achievement of the last sixty years”, and one that enabled us to see that “our mastery of nature could confer almost limitless abundance”. 

The Green Revolutionaries understood “that food is ultimately information” and that “information wants to be free”— ergo, food wants to be free. Their successors are making the revolution permanent. Thanks to such salivatingly named companies as Finless Foods, Memphis Meats and Impossible Foods we can look forward to “using a 3D printer to ‘print’ steaks, bacon rashers or even a leg of lamb”.

‘Like a music video’

In bypassing the animal’s whole-body processes, the shift to synthetic animal products will, notwithstanding the soy inputs required, enable savings in land use and labour. Yet, the overall energy inputs could be higher than in today’s industrial agriculture, warns Bastani. He may be right. Methane emissions would fall but CO2 emissions could even rise.

But even as the vats fill with tissue-engineered proteins, the solution has arrived, in the form of ever cheaper and exponentially more abundant renewable energy.

Driven by a “tendency to extreme supply”, Bastani foresees “the end of energy scarcity altogether”. Thanks to the internet of things, “in just a few years saving energy—in your home, car and workplace—will be entirely automated”. The fulcrum of the renewables revolution will be our four-wheeled friends. “Cars won’t just be data processors on wheels, they’ll be giant portable batteries.”

With the exponential ramping up of wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles and batteries, Bastani recognises that the supply of such minerals as nickel, zinc, copper, lithium, platinum and rare earth metals —will ”quickly become strained”.

But even as the minerals-guzzling drive to a low-carbon economy revs up, the solution is arriving, in the shape of Elon Musk’s SpaceX setting sail for the asteroids. Of those big ball bearings in the heavens, Bastani’s telescope settles on one that gleams especially bright: 16 Psyche.

Suspended midway between Mars and Jupiter, 16 Psyche consists of iron, nickel and copper, with gold and platinum too. Its iron alone could be worth $10 quintillion, and if you scoop up a bunch of other asteroids their combined mineral wealth, “if equally divided among every person on Earth, would add up to more than $100 billion each.”

From this he concludes that “under FALC, we will see more of the world than ever before … and lead lives equivalent, if we wish, to those of today’s billionaires”. Luxury communism indeed, and awash with glamour. “Yes, when you’re relaxing,” FALC “will look like a music video”.

Now, how can we get our pickaxes into Psyche? A NASA mission may be launched in 2022 and, courtesy of a Mars gravity assist, might reach it by 2026. At some point after that, our guide assures us, Psyche can be harpooned and towed from its current location “into near Earth orbit” where—as soon as a bunch of technological obstacles are overcome—off-world mining can begin in earnest.

Asteroid mining is the prerequisite for FALC, because without it “the limits of the earth would confine post-capitalism to conditions of abiding scarcity [and] the realm of freedom would remain out of reach.”

Seizing Psyche will mean “the limits of the earth won’t matter anymore—we’ll mine the sky instead”. Mineral scarcity will cease to thwart our ambitions, and raw materials will become available in “extreme supply”. This is the final link in a chain that will permit humanity “to entirely exceed our present limits”.

Bastani’s Law

There is metaphysics in the madness. It’s there in the claim that “information, resources, energy, health, labour and food want to be free”. This axiom is the cornerstone of the manifesto. Let’s call it Bastani’s Law. As he puts it, the “tendency to extreme supply” ensures that “everything will become permanently cheaper.”

Bastani’s Law permits us to seek techno-fixes to climate collapse — and indeed most other social problems — with a blasé shrug at issues of resource constraint and scalability. What will all the robots be made of? Megatonnes of stardust. What of energy-saving innovations such as the Passivhaus—how much concrete will be poured if the world’s buildings are to be razed and replaced? Psyche will provide.

If we are to gamble the planet’s future on Bastani’s 10-Year Plan its calculations need to be as hermetic as a cosmonaut’s suit. But they are nothing of the sort. The grasp of climate science—including current CO2 levels, and estimates of future heating—is wobbly, as is the claim that energy consumption is in secular decline in the world’s richest countries.

When highlighting a recent fall in Britain’s energy use it forgets that this is in large measure an accounting trick, given the massive and rising CO2 imports from China and elsewhere. It proposes, without warrant, that fossil fuel prices will remain high even if demand falls due to renewable alternatives.

Bastani can declare solar energy to be “Limitless, Clean, Free” only by pretending that no real doubts or debate exist over its EROI, by assuming that it displaces fossil energy rather than adding to it, and neglecting to mention either that there is a real prospect of its price ceasing to fall or that its sharpest cost plunge occurred when manufacturing was shifted to low-wage China — where, given coal-sourced power, the manufacture of photovoltaic panels is carbon-intensive as well as highly polluting.

Saudi sunlight

As the title suggests, this is a breathless manifesto. Its descriptions of technologies are gushing. Innovations are “dizzying”, progress is “exponential”. Plaudits are showered on any firm or state that has invested in solar photovoltaics, lab-grown meat, or asteroid mining.

Without hesitation or irony, Saudi Arabia is extolled for its solar-energy plans. They demonstrate “precisely the scale and ambition that is needed to move the world beyond fossil fuels by 2040″. 

With a steady patter of quotes from CEOs, the tone is often less manifesto than marketing brochure for SpaceX and other “disruptive” corporations. We are whisked from one marvellous fact or promise to the next. New medical technologies could “spell the end of age-related and inherited illness altogether”, rockets can be 3D-printed using “lasers that melt a steady stream of aluminium wire into liquid metal”, and so on.

Such gadgets may be cutting-edge but the tune is old. We hear the same notes as in Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, Charles Babbage and John Ramsay McCulloch in the nineteenth, and we might almost hear Lenin’s adage—Communism is “Soviet power plus electrification”— except that in this manifesto the pylons are towering, the rest is secondary.

Back to the Future Shock

New tech isn’t just a source of awed admiration for Bastani, but the heartbeat of history, the wellspring of the great “disruptions” that drive progress. He identifies critical moments of disruption in which changing technology sparked social transformation.

Thanks to settled agriculture, humans accumulated surplus, began to cooperate in complex ways, asserted mastery over all other creatures, and began, “for the first time in their existence, to think about the future and make plans”. 

Thanks to the printing press, Martin Luther and the Reformation triumphed. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, the power of fossil fuels was unleashed, catapulting humanity to our present state of potential abundance. And now, with IT, we see exponentially accelerating progress in the “cost of collecting, processing, storing and distributing digital information”, leading to extreme supply and “making possible the Third Disruption”.

It’s a remarkably Whiggish account. It overlooks the dark side of the Neolithic revolution. It notes only in passing that transformed social relations preceded the Industrial Revolution. The leaps in productivity and cheapening costs over which Bastani effuses were enabled as much by imperialist land grabs and by altered organisations of production, often with the aim of disciplining and controlling workers, as by new technologies per se.

Bastani’s analysis of the three disruptions and the role of IT rehashes mid-twentieth century prophesies of the post-industrial order. It bears clear resemblances to Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s Future Shock, but Bastani draws especially on another prophet from the same era, the business guru Peter Drucker.

Drucker, having come to see that information “had become the primary factor of production” and was supplanting the traditional factors (labour, land and capital), then, in the 1990s, noticed that the economy had entered not merely a post-industrial but a “post-capitalist” phase.

Yet neither Drucker nor earlier prophets of post-capitalism (Bastani mentions Marx and Keynes) could foresee how the new information-based “mode of production would stitch itself into the fabric of the present.”

The genius who grasped that needlework was the neoliberal economist Paul Romer. His insight was that technological change is in essence immaterial: it amounts to “nothing more than an upgraded re-arrangement of previous information.” It follows that the most valuable input into commodities today, information, is “capable of infinite replication at near zero cost”.

From this Romerian yarn, Bastani spins his central thesis: the supply of resources under capitalism tends to infinity. But, he adds, in a departure from Romer, the gains won’t translate into fully democratic luxury under capitalist conditions. If there is one single shortcoming in capitalism it is “its inability to accept natural abundance” and to allow prices to fall as far as they should. Unlocking that cornucopia requires an automated communist cosmos.

Hand-mill, steam-mill, asteroid mines

If the FALC manifesto is idiosyncratic, it is because it splices the ideas of Romer and Drucker—and Keynes—together with those of Marx and Engels. Drucker and Keynes, it asserts, shared Marx’s prognosis of “how capitalism might lead to a system beyond it”. It’s a conclusion that Bastani can reach by reducing Marx’s work to a few crude motifs, almost all taken from his early work or from a brief fragment of the Grundrisse.

Through Bastani’s ventriloquism, Marx is a technological determinist. Tools and inventions are the active agent in history, ushering humanity from one “paradigm” to the next. Each “economic foundation” gives rise to its own “superstructure”: the hand-mill gives you feudalism, the steam-mill gives you capitalism, asteroid mining gives you FALC.

Technological change in capitalism is especially progressive, for in the continual substitution of machines for labour (both “animal and human”), capital “undermines labour as the central factor of production” until we reach the present day when capital, embodied in AI, itself “becomes labour”.

The economic consequences are, first, “that the role of humans as the most important factor of production,” and the creator of value, “is bound to diminish”, and, second, a tendency to “ever cheaper and more efficient ways of producing commodities” and ceaseless improvements in the “goods and services available to consumers”.

With this, Bastani arrives at capitalism’s fundamental contradiction: competition drives down the price of the key factor of production, information, but in so doing it cuts off the fuel supply—profits—to the capitalist engine.

Capitalism is “a force of potential liberation”. Its record was “impressive” right up until the early 1980s, but then, with the advent of the neoliberal era (and the birth of the prophet of FALC), it all turned south. Today, capitalism is disintegrating, for it is incompatible with the digital revolution it has unleashed. (Those familiar with Paul Mason’s PostCapitalism or Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future will hear the echoes.)

Critique of political economy

All this makes a caricature of Marx. In the FALC manifesto, there is little need for a critical analysis of capitalist social relations—Marx’s project—because communism will arrive automatically, through the acceleration of the logic of capitalist production, backed by state power.

Bastani’s framing of capitalism as a delivery machine of ever-cheaper goods is rooted in the conceptual paradigms of bourgeois political economy, of which much of Marx’s life’s work was a critique. Marx slammed the ‘factors of production’ approach to economics to which Bastani subscribes, and whereas Bastani hails capitalism as profoundly progressive, Marx was ambivalent.

Marx didn’t share Bastani’s belief that businesses are systematically driven to improve goods and services, and while, yes, there is in capitalism a systematic drive to reduce production costs, it relentlessly displaces other costs (‘externalities’) onto people and nature.

Nor did he conflate technology with the “economic foundation,” extracting it from the complexity of social life and attributing to it unlimited powers, as does Bastani. Capital, for Marx, is a social relation. It does not “become” labour; and knowledge and information are not separated out as a value-yielding “factor of production” that supplants labour.

Labour itself is not simply a factor of production, but the connecting tissue of social life: the agent of humanity’s metabolic interaction with nature, and of our collective life-making, but at the same time a commodified force that is exploited and put to work by capital.

From the ensuing contradictions (exchange value versus use value) flow Marx’s analysis of class struggle and the labour movement, terms that are pivotal to the Communist Manifesto but are mentioned only in passing in the FALC Manifesto—and even then, with the stipulation that movements must not seek “to turn down the volume on modernity”.

Whiggish urges

In a few words: this is an entertaining but absurd book. It is quaint in its belief that its advocacy of a “disruptive green industrial policy” is in any meaningful sense radical—when this has already become the standard patter of international governmental organisations such as UNEP.

Its alloying of a Whiggish ideology of technological progress with a recognition of impending ecological disaster, and of an excoriation of neoliberalism with tech boosterism, give it a distinctive flavour. It will be seen as a cousin to other tomes of technophilic socialism, such as Inventing the Future.

Indeed the alikeness of Bastani’s central slogans—Full Automation and Universal Basic Services (UBS)—and Williams and Srnicek’s Full Automation and Universal Basic Income is hard to miss. But Bastani’s book differs in taking environmental crisis seriously, and in disavowing the dogmatic antipathy to “localism” that defines the Williams-Srnicek mission. His arguments for economic “re-localisation”, at least of finance and of workplace ownership, and for UBS, are well made.

In closing, we may ask why this matters. First, Bastani’s book represents a new iteration of the view, propounded in different ways by theorists from Kautsky to Negri and Mason, that irresistible technological/economic forces lead inevitably to the dissolution of the capitalist system, and moreover that it is, behind everyone’s back, already ending. It’s a sanguine, ‘ever-upwards’ cast of determinist thought that, with its optimism of the intellect and pessimism of the will, can justify strategic inaction.

Secondly, Britain’s Labour Party is calling for a Green Industrial Revolution but what sort of revolution will it be? Should it be from below, “built from the ground up,” as some Labour members have argued? Or will it continue the project of the Industrial Revolution and the Green Revolution, potentially a bonanza for capital but at an exorbitant ecological and social cost?

Thirdly, in championing automation as the decisive and dynamic ingredient of social progress, Bastani is reproducing what Alf Hornborg identifies as the “central fetish of industrial capitalism”. For capital, technology is the only solution — and it is one that promises profits. The FALC manifesto peddles the nostrum that technology will save the planet — arguably the greatest delusion of our times. The effect of technophilic fantasies is to spread complacency.

We saw it with BECCS at Paris. Just those three short years ago, BECCS was the wonder tech. The Paris Agreement was built on it. But it was quicksand. Today, it is increasingly apparent that BECCS is unviable at scale. The Paris Agreement is in tatters. Its magic bullet was a promissory note — that salvation lies through burning wood and burying the carbon — but the note was ink on paper, and it is now aflame.

FALC has been aptly described as “soft science fiction,” an imaginary of magical sustainability that, in its techno-fetishism, bears the stamp of “the same fossil-fuel dependent system that it seeks to criticize”. Bastani may wish to reach to the heavens, to grapple with that scintillating Psyche, but we’d be better off looking for solutions below.

This Author 

Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale.

Most bumblebees in the UK have had an incredibly tough year in 2018 due to weather extremes, from snowstorms to drought,  conservationists have said.

But several rare species which emerge late and love hot conditions had a very good year, a report from the Bumblebee Conservation Trust reveals.

Data from volunteer “BeeWalks” through the spring and summer showed that freezing conditions in late February and early March, as the country was hit by the “Beast from the East”, delayed the start of the 2018 bumblebee season.

Queens

Most of the 24 species of UK bumblebee got off to a slow start and only reached normal numbers in July, which experts said suggested the queen bees were late out of hibernation and slow to produce large numbers of workers.

The hot, dry summer caused further problems for the insects, with many species declining more quickly than normal as the year progressed and the heatwave wilted and parched flowers, reducing the amount of food for them.

The early bumblebee had its worst year since the near constant rain in 2012, while species commonly seen in people’s backyards, such as the garden, buff-tailed, heath and white-tailed bumblebees all had poor years.

Last year was the worst for the number of individuals per species recorded since the washout weather in 2012, and conservationists are concerned that that could have a knock-on effect for 2019 numbers.

That is because the heatwave could have affected the number of queens which made it into hibernation last winter.

Flower-rich

The country’s bumblebees could face long-term problems from the more frequent heatwaves that the UK is likely to see with climate change, the wildlife organisation warns.

But 2018 saw better news for a handful of rare species, including the brown-banded carder bee, the shrill carder bee and the large garden bee – all warmth-loving species which are at the north edge of their range in England and Wales.

They all emerge late so the icy conditions in March will largely not have affected them.

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust also said all three have been the focus of projects to create and conserve suitable habitat for them.

The citizen science BeeWalk scheme has been running since 2010 and sees volunteers walk a fixed monitoring route roughly 1-2km in length (0.6-1.2 miles) through some flower-rich habitat and recording the bees they see.

Rarities

Each of the network of routes is walked at least once a month between March and October, with data from 559 sites submitted by 482 people in 2018.

Dr Richard Comont, science manager at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, said: “Whilst it is great to see the four ‘biggest species winners’ from our latest ‘BeeWalk’ data are rare bumblebees, it’s concerning to see four of our seven commonest bumblebees have declined over the last nine years.”

Gill Perkins, the trust’s chief executive, said: “I greatly welcome the latest BeeWalk report and thank all those who ‘BeeWalked’ in 2018.

“Their amazing efforts allow us to answer the critical question ‘how the UK’s bumblebees are doing’ using high-quality evidence.

“I’m particularly concerned by the declines reported in some of our common garden species.” And she urged: “We all need to make sure our gardens, parks and green spaces are bumblebee-friendly to stop today’s common species becoming tomorrow’s rarities.”

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Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.