A study of England’s farmland has found key earthworm types are rare or absent in two out of five fields and has led to the majority of farmers affected vowing to change the way they farm.

The results indicate widespread, historical over-cultivation, and may explain observed declines in other wildlife, such as the song thrush, that feed on these worms.

The #60minworms project was the first comprehensive worm survey concentrating solely on farmland and was carried out by farmers themselves – 57 percent of whom said they would now change their soil management practices as a result.

Ecosystem services

The scientist behind the survey, Dr Jackie Stroud, a NERC soil security fellow at Rothamsted Research, said: “Earthworms are sensitive and responsive to soil management which makes them an ideal soil health indicator. 

“The aim of this research was to find a baseline of farmland earthworm populations that would be useful and used by farmers to assess soil health now and in the future.”

Biologists categorise earthworms by ecological role – with surface dwelling and deep burrowing worms the types most sensitive to farming practices, whilst the topsoil worms are generally unaffected by over-cultivation. Earthworms perform a number of useful ‘ecosystem services’, and high numbers of earthworms have been linked to enhanced plant productivity.

This new citizen science project published today in the journal PLOS One, has revealed most fields have good earthworm biodiversity – meaning an abundance of all three types of earthworms were seen.

In Spring 2018, the average field had nine earthworms in every spadeful of soil, with top fields having three times that number. One in 10 fields had high earthworm numbers of more than 16 worms per spadeful.

Successful pilot 

However, the study also revealed that 42 percent of fields had poor earthworm biodiversity – meaning either very few or none of the surface dwelling and deep burrowing worms were seen.

Dr Stroud said that the absence of deep burrowing worms on 16 percent of fields is concerning because they are ‘drainage worms’ with vertical burrows that aid water infiltration and ultimately helps combat waterloggin.

 “The deep burrowing worms have slow reproduction rates so recovery in their populations could take a decade under changed management practices.  In fact, we know very little about earthworm recovery rates,” she added.

More than 1,300 hectares were surveyed from all over England for the project, including fields managed under arable, potatoes, horticulture and pasture. 

Each farmer volunteered to dig 10 regularly spaced pits across their field to make the observations, and an identification guide allowed them to allocate any sightings to one of the three main types of earthworm.

The success of this pilot project has already led to a much larger study, which recently concluded. 

Soil health 

Working with farmers led to the redesign of the pilot survey, culminating in a shorter, more efficient field assessment and a co-created earthworm identification guide, to help improve farmer confidence in earthworm monitoring.

These improvements were well received, with farmers all over the country spending an hour of their time digging five soil pits and assessing their earthworm populations in the Autumn.

Empowering farmers to survey their own soils would save about £14 million in soil health monitoring if rolled out nationally. 

Healthy Soils were not a headline indicator for the draft DEFRA 25-year plan for the environment, so the DEFRA policy aspiration of achieving sustainable soils is currently unclear. 

Despite this, soil health is widely regarded as vital for both farming and the environment.

Farming practices 

Dr Stroud said: “Decisions made above the ground, whether by farmers or policy makers, influence the billions of earthworms that are engineering the soil ecosystem below the ground.

“Earthworms influence carbon cycling, water infiltration, pesticide movement, greenhouse gas emissions, plant productivity, the breeding success of birds and even the susceptibility of plants to insect attack.”

However, she added, as earthworms are sensitive to various farming practices, including tillage, rotations, cover cropping, organic matter additions, and pesticides, we need to do more to look after them.

Dr stroud continued: “Crucially, working together with farmers, we now know typical earthworm numbers in agricultural soils and between us have developed a quick method for ongoing monitoring.  Many farmers have reported they plan to survey again this Spring following benchmarking their fields last year.

“Soil health is complicated, but the path to doing things differently has to begin somewhere.”    

The work is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) with facilities provided by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Rothamstead Research. 

Image: Thomas Brown, Flickr. 

“We are creating natural spaces that people of all ages can benefit from”. This is the promise from Carol Rowntree Jones of the National Forest, announcing that Timber festival will return on 5 July 2019, with music, debate, theatre, spoken word, performance and provocation from some of the UK’s leading thinkers and artists,  

Timber is a site-specific festival located in response to the National Forest landscape at Feanedock, a 70 acre woodland site in the midlands. The woodland has been transformed from a former coalfield to be part of the first forest to be created at scale in England for over 1,000 years.   

Timber aims to engage visitors with the natural environment and the programme offers varied opportunities from bush craft to yoga to explore and reevaluate our relationship with trees and nature.

Live music

Ms Rowntree Jones added:”Timber has grown out of this unique transformation, and is the perfect way to share this vision with a whole new generation of people – how trees can transform lives as well as the landscape. By coming to Timber you are part of the National Forest story and we welcome you.”

Guest speakers include writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie. Stuart is returning to Timber in 2019 for his second festival and will be talking about his book The Long Road From Jarrow.

Welsh and Cornish speaking musician Gwenno described as ‘the visionary of Synth Pop’ by Pitchfork, will be taking part in a discussion about minority languages, music and the landscape.

Gwenno Saunders is a sound artist, DJ, radio presenter and singer from Cardiff who has released two albums – the first, hailed as ‘one of the best British debuts of 2015, was in Welsh, while last year’s Le Kov is in Cornish, created with long term collaborator Rhys Edwards. The conversation will be followed by the chance to hear Gwenno’s forthcoming Radio 4 documentary, Songs from the Edgelands.

Live music will include sets from Jesca Hoop. Her recent album on Sub Pop Records wastes no time in making clear its confidence, confrontation, and craftsmanship. The stark and reverberant title track opens the set with a fighting spirit that serves as an anthem to push through any obstacle and put forth your very best work.

You Tell Me will be performing on Timber’s Nightingale stage. Peter Brewis has been honing the craft of pop songwriting for almost fifteen years as one half of band Field Music. Sarah Hayes joins him in this new venture and they will be performing music from their self-titled debut album.

Performance art 

BBC Radio 4’s Geoff Bird will be hosting Wilderness Tracks where guests chose six pieces of music that soundtrack their relationship with nature.

Laura Barton is an English music journalist, writer and radio presenter and she will be the first guest to join Geoff. As contributing editor at Q magazine and a former staff writer on The Guardian, Laura’s new book on music and sadness will be published this year. Her Radio 4 series ‘Laura Barton’s Notes on a Musical Island’ dwells on the intricate connections between music and place.

BBC presenter and broadcaster Elizabeth Alker is one of Timber’s guest curators and she will be taking over the Eyrie stage on Saturday, programming a mixture of live music, spoken word and a DJ set. Elizabeth is perhaps best known for presenting the music news on BBC6 Music’s Radcliffe & Maconie show, as well as hosting her weekend breakfast show on BBC Radio 3.

Timber plays host to all kinds of magic and it is the live performances, arts and theatre that make the site come alive for festival-goers, creating lasting memories.

The Forest of Dreams is a performance project that combines storytelling, puppetry and projections. Delivered by B Arts from Stoke on Trent, Timber will host the premiere of the outdoor adaptation of this piece.

Visitors will be sure to bump into Trixie and Tilly, two eccentric tea ladies, who serve their fine leaf drink from their special musical trolley- dancing to their favourite Gramophone records as they swirl and stir along their way.

Wild Rumpus 

Trixie and Tilly are part of Tea Club, an outdoor strolling piece of dance theatre celebrating Britain’s passion for tea and all things vintage, produced by Axial Dance.

Artist Dan Fox will be presenting his work Shimmer a freestanding installation with 12 branches, each with a cymbal suspended from it. The 12-channel piece is designed to be heard in the round and the audience will be invited to stand underneath the cymbal canopy and absorb the sound.

Timber is collaboration between the National Forest and Wild Rumpus, an award-winning arts organisation, specialising in showcasing arts and culture in the natural environment.

Wild Rumpus will be creating a new piece of work for Timber 2019 exploring the site’s coalmining heritage. Throughout the National Forest are coal seams that wind beneath the landscape.

Seams will take the audience on a multi-sensory journey inspired by the evocative names and diagrams of the coal seams that surround Feanedock. Don your miners helmet and venture below ground, for a sound and light installation through dark stony bind, and nether coal, before emerging into a brave new world, viewing Feanedock in a whole new light.

Rowan Hoban, director, Wild Rumpus, said: “We’re very excited about this year’s Timber. We have some inspiring speakers who really understand what the festival is about. They will be talking about their experience of landscapes.

“Our audiences can expect to step out of their everyday lives into an extraordinary space – which will be transformed by our artists and musicians to create a truly memorable weekend festival experience.”

This Author 

This article is based on a press release from Timber Festival. For more information on the programme visit their website; to buy tickets click here.  Follow Timber Festival at @timber_festival, www.facebook.com/timberfestivaluk/, and www.instagram.com/timberfestival/

The rise in youth activism on climate change is not only uplifting to see – it’s frankly essential. This is particularly true at a time when Brexit dominates everything and the UK is gripped with political uncertainty.

The face of Greta Thunberg – the impassioned sixteen year-old Swedish climate activist has become synonymous with the rise youth climate activism.

Her dire warnings to global political elites of the impending realities of climate change have become the stuff of a million retweets and Facebook shares. With her clarity and rousing calls to action, she has become the face of a young generation of activists.

Climate Strike

In recent weeks, the sight of thousands of school children skipping lessons to deliver dire warnings to those in power have lifted the spirits of millions of jaded older activists. They stand as a stark reminder of the future that all in the environmental movement are fighting for.

According the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – we have under twelve years to prevent runaway climate change. While other issues have come to dominate both domestically and on the international stage, we have been losing time. Something which is at the forefront of the minds of the new, young generation of climate activists.

From the rallying cries of the Extinction Rebellion Movement to Thunberg’s moving speeches – the tone of climate activism has changed and with good reason. For years it has been urgent but now that urgency is ever greater, and our movements are reinforcing this message.

As we speak of extinction, existential threat and the kind of future that may be denied to today’s young – we must not lose the justice arguments within the climate discussion. It is after all the world’s poorest people who will bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change, while the lion’s share of the responsibility lies with the global elite.

A Broad-based Movement

As 2019 unfolds – I hope it will be a year that sees a rising tide of climate action with young people leading from the front. Seeing people of all ages willing to take direct action as part of the Extinction rebellion Movement and young people demonstrating their passion for the cause is a reminder of the need for a large, broad-based movement to achieve the change we need.

It is essential that activists, whether aged nine or ninety-five draw connections between the big issues of our day – linking climate change with the role of the global elite and corporate power.

As activists and community members we must celebrate the informed passionate and creative approach that young people bring to climate campaigning. They are the ones who will suffer as a result of inaction.

The stereotype of the self-interested politically disengaged youth is a pernicious falsehood.

The School Strike for Climate movement  is in its infancy and could be a powerful component of progressive environmental activism globally.

To challenge the vested interests that stand in the way of meaningful climate action – coordinated action between young and older activists of all ages is essential. Here’s to further strikes and young people in the UK and globally taking powerful steps to fight for a future for all of us.

This Author

Andrew Taylor-Dawson has been involved with the social justice and environmental movements for over a decade. He works in the NGO sector as well as writing about civil society, campaigning and progressive causes. Twitter: @Andrew_J_Taylor.

The rise in youth activism on climate change is not only uplifting to see – it’s frankly essential. This is particularly true at a time when Brexit dominates everything and the UK is gripped with political uncertainty.

The face of Greta Thunberg – the impassioned sixteen year-old Swedish climate activist has become synonymous with the rise youth climate activism.

Her dire warnings to global political elites of the impending realities of climate change have become the stuff of a million retweets and Facebook shares. With her clarity and rousing calls to action, she has become the face of a young generation of activists.

Climate Strike

In recent weeks, the sight of thousands of school children skipping lessons to deliver dire warnings to those in power have lifted the spirits of millions of jaded older activists. They stand as a stark reminder of the future that all in the environmental movement are fighting for.

According the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – we have under twelve years to prevent runaway climate change. While other issues have come to dominate both domestically and on the international stage, we have been losing time. Something which is at the forefront of the minds of the new, young generation of climate activists.

From the rallying cries of the Extinction Rebellion Movement to Thunberg’s moving speeches – the tone of climate activism has changed and with good reason. For years it has been urgent but now that urgency is ever greater, and our movements are reinforcing this message.

As we speak of extinction, existential threat and the kind of future that may be denied to today’s young – we must not lose the justice arguments within the climate discussion. It is after all the world’s poorest people who will bear the brunt of the impacts of climate change, while the lion’s share of the responsibility lies with the global elite.

A Broad-based Movement

As 2019 unfolds – I hope it will be a year that sees a rising tide of climate action with young people leading from the front. Seeing people of all ages willing to take direct action as part of the Extinction rebellion Movement and young people demonstrating their passion for the cause is a reminder of the need for a large, broad-based movement to achieve the change we need.

It is essential that activists, whether aged nine or ninety-five draw connections between the big issues of our day – linking climate change with the role of the global elite and corporate power.

As activists and community members we must celebrate the informed passionate and creative approach that young people bring to climate campaigning. They are the ones who will suffer as a result of inaction.

The stereotype of the self-interested politically disengaged youth is a pernicious falsehood.

The School Strike for Climate movement  is in its infancy and could be a powerful component of progressive environmental activism globally.

To challenge the vested interests that stand in the way of meaningful climate action – coordinated action between young and older activists of all ages is essential. Here’s to further strikes and young people in the UK and globally taking powerful steps to fight for a future for all of us.

This Author

Andrew Taylor-Dawson has been involved with the social justice and environmental movements for over a decade. He works in the NGO sector as well as writing about civil society, campaigning and progressive causes. Twitter: @Andrew_J_Taylor.

Opposite my bedroom window in Sheffield, across the street in the doctor’s surgery carpark, was a small patch of woodland, around 20 foot square. It held rowan trees, on which the birds were feeding through the winter, and buddleia on which butterflies and bees fed in the spring and summer.

It did attract some rubbish dumping. I cleaned up the edges of it one day on a Green Party litter pick. But mostly it was greenery with flowers, and full of life. A small flock of sparrows spent a lot of time hanging out in it. It was home to a couple of blackbirds.

Yet a couple of Saturday mornings back I came out to find it all being razed to the ground. The rubbish is still there, but the home for wildlife is well and truly gone.

Hibernate

That’s a microcosm of what we see again and again in Britain, one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world that is at the cutting edge of poisoning, slashing, degrading our natural world.

The county council of Buckinghamshire has outdone itself in deciding that – despite this dreadful age of local government austerity – it would go to special lengths to find an extra half-million pounds to visit such destruction on “unwanted greenery” in its towns and villages.

It would spray three times areas it specially wanted to denude – most likely with glyphosate, the disastrous, indiscriminate, toxic chemical that most of the rest of Europe is moving to ban.

No doubt, if asked, the councillors would express concern about the loss of favourite local birds, of hedgehogs and insects.

And then they go on finding scarce funds especially to ensure that these creatures have no place to feed, no roost for the night, no pile of branches in which to hibernate.

Strange

The public at least instinctively understands the problem. Wherever I go doorknocking around the country it is noticeable how many homes have a fat ball for the birds hanging from a feeder, a hedgehog home nestled in a shady corner, a bird box – people are trying to do their bit.

But a study just out of birdboxes illustrates the problem with this approach.

It found that being dry and sealed, the contents of birdboxes didn’t “self-clean” over the winter, as hollows and niches in trees and bushes do. Fleas (and certainly other parasites) overwintered in them very comfortably, just ready to feast on the hatchlings, diseases lurk ready to strike.

Nature is best at what it does – anything human is a poor imitation. Farmland is far less productive than wilderness. A bird box and a fat ball is better than nothing, but nowhere near as good as a patch of woodland and “weeds”, otherwise known as wildflowers.

But we experience so little of it now, that it seems strange, alien, even threatening to us.

Education programme

Nature is not tidy. It doesn’t have straight edges. It doesn’t stay within neat lines. And it is all the more wonderful for that.

It is the rich world of life that the human race evolved in and is dependent on for its survival. There’s even medical evidence that looking at straight lines is bad for us and that nature in cities contributes to the healthy human microbiome that we’re increasingly understanding is vital for mental and physical health.

We need to learn to live with nature, rather than slashing and poisoning it. And we need to make sure that particularly our young are familiar and comfortable with it.

Perhaps Buckinghamshire County Council could have a rethink. Instead of destroying nature, it might put that money towards supporting school trips into the natural world, into forest schools and education programmes in wildlife reserves.

Maybe it could arrange an education programme for councillors, or put the funds to signing up to the United Nations’ Healthy Urban Microbiome Initiative.

This Author 

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

‘For engineers to make more electric things and not diesel things!’ These words do not belong to me, but instead are Freddy’s. He is seven, and last week, stood in front of a crowd of hundreds to give a speech.

Like a great offering to something beyond himself, he spoke with an aching rawness, lost in the voice of policy. But no parent or teacher shadowed him, and the only hand he held was his own, as he grappled with the microphone.

Freddy didn’t say these words at school. For while he might have learnt about cars and electricity in the classroom of his primary, a platform for speaking so intensely has been peeled from the fabric of the curriculum.

Education

Children in schools are voiceless.

We swear allegiance to textbook litanies, binding ourselves to the task of passing a test – a bitter, acidic symbiosis during which we’re forced to devote our existence to memorisation. The prize at the end of this, is empty, and lonely – the hollow reward of self-interest: grades. The higher they are, the worse everyone else did.

Barred from sports, art, and the outdoors, we are split from our peers as education wheezes under the burden of its own standards. Values integral to our development: independent thought, social action, and citizenship are dropped from the foreground and relegated to the shadows of ‘extracurricular’.

But in schools what is really extinct is the voice of the student. Kids on school councils have little influence other than the location of a picnic bench, sixteen year olds are yet to receive the vote, and with the youth parliament left unnoticed, our generation can speak only in silence. Like our planet, and the people most at risk of its destruction, we are pushed aside by the power of big government, big business, and big voices.

But, teenagers seem to me to understand the reality of climate destruction far more vividly than politicians, as our futures quake underneath our feet. Quaking like the news of storms which hit us month after month. Another hurricane, another drought, another famine.

Human tragedies spiral out of control every day as climate destruction proves that the populations already the most vulnerable to even small changes in the environment will suffer the fastest and hardest at its collapse.

Such truths are elementary to us now, moulding into our vocabulary. But we didn’t learn them at school. For education on climate change is restricted to diagrams and data, failing to teach us the true nature of the nightmare world we will inhabit. Instead, schools leave us to fumble over turning off the lights as a way to avoid total global collapse.

I think we see now, why so many textbooks heralded this as an effective solution to avoiding the destruction of the climate. Perhaps they did not want us to see through their lies. Perhaps they want to keep us in the dark.

Reality

Young eyes see collapse where adults do not. But we now know where the truth lies – we are the eye of the storm, we are the point from which destruction spirals, the final calm before everything falls apart.

This is our world now, one which our education leaves us unprepared to grow up in. Our futures will be marked by floods, fires, and famine, but education does little to recognise our fears, let alone help us build new ways in which to avoid their realisation.

So, as students we striked from school so that our absence makes you realise what education lacks. A sense of humans that live beyond the textbooks, and especially the textbook definitions of climate change which forgo all talk of social consequence.

And we are learning. Learning about how to speak in a public space, learning how to talk to the press, learning how to communicate, coordinate ourselves, and find a sense of community where all else fractures around us at the hands of politicians more in control of our futures than we are.

School taught us history, we are subverting the power structures which have dictated it. Our education does not end with a school strike, but will be improved by it.

If there’s anything I’ve learnt from my education in activism, then it’s that true hope exists only in action, in the solidarity which arises from a shared and deep fear. Solidarity which rarely exists in a school system which pushes us against each other to fight for grades, grit, and greed.

New Pathways

Reforming education starts, but does not end with fixing the way we teach climate. It requires a school system in which self-interest is not the end goal, but the creation of a culture in which we pay attention to the ecological principles abandoned in order to fulfil the consumerism we’ve been raised on.

Education for the future we will we inherit requires teachers, textbooks, and tests alike to change, and as we see this not really happening, we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands, in the only way we can.

By making you feel the absence we feel everyday.

This Author

Sophie Sleeman, 17, from Devon is an activist with the UK Student Climate Network, the organization mobilizing the Youth Strike 4 Climate movement. Sophie tweets at @SleemanSophie.

I continue to have hope and feel a shift in the way people view themselves in relation to the larger, global ecosystem. And reading Why we need ‘ecolocracy’ re-affirmed my belief in humanity’s ability to stop and reflect upon itself and the impact we’ve had on the natural world to meet our needs.

The recent wave of student protests sweeping across Europe needs our attention and our support.

Their protesting of governments’ neglecting to adequately address one of our most urgent challenges, climate change, clearly demonstrates that young people understand the need for change and want change enough to take to the streets and risk fines for not attending school.

Forgotten relationship

They realise the complexity of the situation and their sense of urgency must be a signal to us all that for us to more than exist in the future, there needs to be change.

Considering that we believe we need and value consumer goods to give our lives meaning drives the continued exploitation of Earth’s resources and each other, we are blindly tied to the delusion created by consumerism and use it as a measure of self-worth and success.

The article Capitalism has become a force of evil reinforces this and reminds me of the continued effectiveness of the advertising that feeds mainstream culture and the illusion that drives consumerism as represented in Manufacturing Consent.

How do we shift people out of, what I call, eco-vacancy and help them bridge the forgotten relationship with nature and understanding of ourselves and our interconnectedness with a higher ecological system – woman with nature as opposed to man over nature?

Collectively

Yes, we can use biomimicry to solve many of the problems we’ve created, but more people need to understand the bio and interconnectedness of all things universal.

For that to happen on a massive scale more schools and more educators must shift from teaching individual subjects which promotes a Newtonian/Mechanistic/fragmented view of the world, to an integrated curriculum that explores and develops a systems view of life way of thinking and then living that life.

Many schools are teaching the skills of systems thinking about the relationship between earth systems and human impact on those systems. But we’re a small pocket movement.

I have hope that the shift will take a firm hold. Once we convince the masses that their needs are natures needs then maybe we can begin the steady and long upward climb towards the significant changes we need to make collectively, to save ourselves.

This Author

Rita Bouchard is an educator at Antioch University of Los Angeles and an advocate for alternative education in public schools.

I continue to have hope and feel a shift in the way people view themselves in relation to the larger, global ecosystem. And reading Why we need ‘ecolocracy’ re-affirmed my belief in humanity’s ability to stop and reflect upon itself and the impact we’ve had on the natural world to meet our needs.

The recent wave of student protests sweeping across Europe needs our attention and our support.

Their protesting of governments’ neglecting to adequately address one of our most urgent challenges, climate change, clearly demonstrates that young people understand the need for change and want change enough to take to the streets and risk fines for not attending school.

Forgotten relationship

They realise the complexity of the situation and their sense of urgency must be a signal to us all that for us to more than exist in the future, there needs to be change.

Considering that we believe we need and value consumer goods to give our lives meaning drives the continued exploitation of Earth’s resources and each other, we are blindly tied to the delusion created by consumerism and use it as a measure of self-worth and success.

The article Capitalism has become a force of evil reinforces this and reminds me of the continued effectiveness of the advertising that feeds mainstream culture and the illusion that drives consumerism as represented in Manufacturing Consent.

How do we shift people out of, what I call, eco-vacancy and help them bridge the forgotten relationship with nature and understanding of ourselves and our interconnectedness with a higher ecological system – woman with nature as opposed to man over nature?

Collectively

Yes, we can use biomimicry to solve many of the problems we’ve created, but more people need to understand the bio and interconnectedness of all things universal.

For that to happen on a massive scale more schools and more educators must shift from teaching individual subjects which promotes a Newtonian/Mechanistic/fragmented view of the world, to an integrated curriculum that explores and develops a systems view of life way of thinking and then living that life.

Many schools are teaching the skills of systems thinking about the relationship between earth systems and human impact on those systems. But we’re a small pocket movement.

I have hope that the shift will take a firm hold. Once we convince the masses that their needs are natures needs then maybe we can begin the steady and long upward climb towards the significant changes we need to make collectively, to save ourselves.

This Author

Rita Bouchard is an educator at Antioch University of Los Angeles and an advocate for alternative education in public schools.

“We are thrilled that Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. is joining the movement of hundreds of brands embracing standardised recycling labeling with How2Recycle. By telling people exactly how to recycle their packaging, Johnson & Johnson is empowering parents to take proper action while making their lives easier.”

This is a statement from Kelly Cramer, lead of How2Recycle at the Sustainable Packaging Coalition. So is this what passes as corporate sustainability these days, in a marketplace littered with crony capitalism?

Is this really how low the bar has dropped for a sustainability announcement in 2018? Is Johnson and Johnson so seduced with their own PR messaging that they’ve come to believe that this action is in any way commensurate with our planet’s environmental challenges?

False complacency 

In the era of climate change (IPCC Special Report) and unprecedented plastic pollution, it’s hard to imagine a company doing less. And for those who say that every little bit helps, I disagree. 

It doesn’t help when a corporation responds to a crisis in this way and makes it sound like an important step. It lulls us into a state of complacency, and rather than standing up and voicing our concerns with what appears to be a serious lack of engagement, we are quiet, believing that someone else is on the job taking care of the problem.

If enhancing wellbeing was a legal requirement of our business model rather than letting the free market decide how best to maximize earnings, imagine how profound an impact this industry could have.

Imagine if it chose to switch from plastic to glass which is endlessly recyclable and if they developed a deposit and collection system (like Ontario Canada where the Beer Store has a 96 percent bottle recovery rate) where all bottles could be reused rather than discarded to wreak havoc on the environment and human health.

Imagine if it publicly challenged another industry that has a single use plastic problem like the bottled water/soda industry, to join them on their journey to reduce social and environmental harm. Now that would be newsworthy. Global recycling of plastic is around nine percent.

Broken system 

Our system is broken – societal wellbeing is mostly absent from large companies’ decision making.

Oh, there are some small gestures here and there and some companies are better at it than others, but the incentive to change operations and rethink business models in this era of plastic pollution, ecosystem degradation and climate change is insignificant (or simply too long term) compared to the vast financial benefits of turning a blind eye and keeping the gravy train rolling along. 

Once a product (or service) and its “delivery container” has served its purpose, much of the cost of garbage collection and processing as well as the damage to ecosystems, biodiversity and human health, magically disappear for the corporation.

Both up and downstream, pollution and waste are essentially free and social exploitation is mostly overlooked. The resulting mess is left for society to clean up – a society that had no say in the choices made by private business and did not share in the profits of the company.

By any rational standard this is monumentally unfair. Every child learns at an early age that they are responsible for cleaning up their own mess but in the era of neoliberalism and crony capitalism, these lessons have seemingly been forgotten.

Ocean plastics

Corporate-friendly governments have made it easier for companies to operate with fewer regulations and have shielded them from legal repercussions of social or environmental harm caused by greed or incompetency.

Corporations, shareholders and the top 0.1 percent have never been happier – crony capitalism has delivered vast wealth. Best of all for the so-called “elites”, society has been seduced into thinking that governments are inefficient and clumsy when it comes to solving problems and that social and environmental problems are best solved using market solutions. Anand Giridharadas explores this issue in his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.

We have reached a new low in proclaiming that business is part of the solution when it comes to environmental and social harm. But, for the sake of argument, let’s allow the staunch market capitalist, free of any government regulation, a chance to tackle the ocean plastic problem?

The first question a good capitalist always asks is, “What is the business opportunity?” The next step is to flush out some of the key issues. Let’s assume the two people involved in the discussion are named Donald and Mickey:

Donald: Mickey, do you know anything about this ocean plastic issue?

Mickey: I think fish are dying and waterways are clogged with plastic which degrades into tiny pieces and poisons fish. I’ve also heard that when the plastic degrades it releases CO2 which contributes to climate change and the tiny pieces of plastic can also enter into human water supplies. Besides that, I think our customers are growing concerned that we might be contributing to this problem. I’ve heard that some of them are looking at our competitors who are exploring how to address this issue.

Donald: Have we done the numbers on how many customers we might lose? 

Mickey: It’s hard to say. Often what people say in a questionnaire/interview is different than when it comes to putting their money on the table. All things being equal, people still seem pretty conditioned to seek out the lowest price.

Donald: Are there any regulations on the horizon that will require us to change our business practices? 

Mickey: None that I know of. In fact, thanks to our consistent lobbying efforts, most political contacts agree that business is the most efficient way to solve these problems. So for the time being government should leave us alone.

Donald: Now onto some of the bigger issues, how would moving away from plastic packaging affect our operations and shareholder returns? Would we need to spend a lot of time finding new suppliers and retooling? 

Mickey: It’s possible that our short term costs would rise which would likely affect our short term profitability. And yes, we would have to find new suppliers, change some of our operational procedures and maybe retool somewhat. We would likely gain some positive PR but it’s very hard to quantify.

Some of the other literature that I’ve read tells me that our employees would feel better about working for us and we might experience lower turnover. One last thing, there is a movement to make investing more “responsible” but the movement is rather weak and most companies can get by by signing a charter or by joining some vague industry commitment for changes that won’t kick in for at least 5-10 years.

Donald: It doesn’t sound too urgent and it all sounds like a quagmire to me. Put together a report and we’ll talk about it with our board at the next meeting in 6 months. And can you please get me a bottled water from the fridge?

Collective wellbeing

There’s no incentive to act immediately and there would likely be negative impacts to our earnings. The benefits of PR are difficult to quantify.

The responsible investing movement is still quite weak and we can make some small industry commitments which won’t cost anything and keep us in good standing for the time being: let’s wait and see what happens with our competitors; let’s get some answers from our political contacts on whether this is something that we will need to address anytime soon – and find out whose campaign we should fund to slow this whole anti-plastic business down.

This is how market (crony) capitalism solves a problem like ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss and broad health impacts. It doesn’t.

Without a clear business case or strong regulations, business will stall and delay. They will look to place the responsibility for their mess on government and society and kick the problem down the road. If they do take any action, (for most companies) it will be the simplest and least costly approach.  

This is precisely why every global ecosystem on our planet is in decline. Not every problem has a market solution. Regulation is necessary when the market is ineffective at protecting our collective wellbeing.

If corporations can’t act for the best interests of society, then we need to push them in that direction. We need to make them responsible for their own mess.

This Author 

Brad Zarnett is the Founder of the Toronto Sustainability Speaker Series (TSSS) which has been showcasing sustainability leadership since 2008. You can follow Brad on twitter at @bradzarnett or on LinkedIn. 

This article was first published on Toronto Sustainability. You can read a follow-up piece here. 

Scientists and regulators have been debating the use of glyphosate and other chemical pesticides for years. Expert assessors have made claims for and against glyphosate’s potential to cause cancer in humans without arriving at a satisfactory consensus and, unsurprisingly, the European Union’s reauthorisation of glyphosate in 2017 resulted in calls for an overhaul of the regulatory process.

Subsequent hearings conducted by the European Parliament’s Special Committee on the Union Authorisation Procedure for Pesticides covered important topics but failed to identify the deeper, more insidious cause of regulatory uncertainty: reliance on the wrong species.

Thousands of rats, dogs, mice, and rabbits have suffered and died in tests for the “safety” assessment of glyphosate. Yet, after decades of testing and retesting, uncertainty surrounding the potential toxicity of the substance – which is widely used in agricultural and consumer products – seems, if anything, to have intensified.

Unreliable tests

Regulators rely heavily on the two-year rodent cancer bioassay to decide whether a chemical will cause cancer in humans.

The test, which was globally adopted as a standardised protocol in 1981, requires hundreds of rats and/or mice and is notorious for producing variable results of questionable relevance to human health.

As many scientific experts will confirm, substances known to cause cancer in humans often fail to do so when tested in rats and mice, and the opposite is also true: one study showed that out of 20 known non-carcinogens in humans, 19 were found to be carcinogenic in other animals.

To assess the human carcinogenicity of glyphosate, international evaluators looked at fourteen separate rodent cancer tests (eight using rats and six using mice). More than 3,500 animals were used, but not a single experiment produced the same results when repeated. EU risk assessors studied additional unpublished test data, meaning the total number of tests conducted is even higher, yet confidence in the regulatory outcome is at an all-time low.

Under today’s validation standards, the rodent cancer bioassay wouldn’t stand up to the scientific scrutiny that is required of new testing strategies under development.

Repeated mistakes

When studies yield questionable and inconsistent outcomes, there has been a tendency – especially with controversial chemicals such as glyphosate – to ignore the problems associated with testing on animals and, astonishingly, to call for more animal testing.

In addition to causing yet more animal suffering, uncertainty leads to delays in regulatory decisions for years or even decades.

According to the president of the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, for just seven of the required toxicology tests used to assess glyphosate, over 100 separate studies have been conducted and at least 31,000 animals have been killed. 

Yet, in addition to being unreliable predictors of adverse health effects in humans, the data produced from these laboratory tests are difficult to extrapolate to real-life human exposure.

There is little doubt that relying on flawed animal tests is hazardous to humans, and the problem won’t be solved by throwing more money at irrelevant tests on animals.

Animal suffering

One rodent cancer bioassay typically uses more than 400 animals.

It begins as soon as possible after the rat or mouse pups are weaned. Usually, they’re forced to ingest chemicals by gavage (a procedure that involves forcing a tube down their throats).

The substances can produce side effects such as painful, long-term tumour growth as well as lethargy, nausea, tremors, and convulsions. The animals undergo daily dosing for up to two years before being killed and dissected.

For each individual animal used in these experiments, pain, suffering, and death are certain. If the goal is to protect human health, regulators and researchers must acknowledge the limitations of these studies and instead rely on data collected using human-relevantmethods.

Superior methods

Fortunately, a paradigm shift toward human-relevant, non-animal test methods is already underway. There are myriad human cell-based techniques and computational models for predicting many adverse health effects, such as local effects on the skin and eyes.

Assessing chemical carcinogenicity is complex, but scientists are rapidly establishing new strategies for identifying potential human carcinogens.

To screen effectively for carcinogens, some researchers are using human tissues to find early-stage cancer markers. Others are developing advanced computational models using artificial intelligence to learn about carcinogenic chemical signatures.

In addition, large, long-term human population studies, such as the Agricultural Health Study, are collecting decades of data to assess the correlation between pesticide application and cancer.

This new, human-relevant technology is bringing us closer to replacing flawed animal tests in order to provide reliable predictions for chemical safety and better protection of human health.

Regulatory shift

Following work carried out by its special committee, the European Parliament has recommended strengthening the regulation of pesticides, improving access to information, and promoting “low-risk” alternatives made from naturally occurring substances.

Importantly, the Parliament recognised the flaws inherent in using animals to predict effects in humans as well as the need for data sharing in order to reduce animal testing and accelerate the development of human-relevant tests.

However, for new methods to be accepted by regulatory authorities, there must be a collective effort by all stakeholders, including manufacturers, regulators, and scientists, to work together to improve the current battery of non-animal tests. The focus must be on human-relevant data.

This Author

Emily McIvor is a science policy adviser for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals Foundation and has more than 20 years of experience of working on EU policy.