Honeybee farmer Jez Rose runs Bees for Business. The company works with businesses that want to adopt a beehive and help reverse the decline of the honeybee, as well as producing award-winning raw British honey under the brand name Bees&Co. 

The business has gained Carbon Neutral status by switching to a 100 percent renewable energy supplier, moving to 100 percent recyclable packaging, reducing identified carbon emissions created as a result of transport or deliveries and off-setting all remaining carbon emissions with a contribution to renewable energy.

It’s carbon neutral credentials endorsed by the Carbon Footprint Standard – an internationally recognised standard for establishing low carbon products.

Reversing the decline

Jez said: “This isn’t just another sustainability milestone for us but probably the most significant and we are delighted to run our organic farm and produce our delicious raw honey in such a way that further protects the environment – a world first. 

“We are an environmentally conscious brand with a campaigning message at our heart. Everything we do is working towards our aim of reversing the decline of the honeybee in the UK.  We have already banned pesticides, chemicals, plastic wrapping, non-recyclable IT products and unnecessary paper from our business.  

“Those businesses that adopt one of our beehives do so safe in the knowledge that not only are they elevating their corporate social responsibility credentials, but they are helping to keep our planet sustainable and helping us ensure the continued existence of the honeybee.”

Award winning 

There are very few food products that can be classified as carbon neutral – and Bees&Co. honey is a first for honey.  The honey produced on the farm is entirely natural, raw, British and produced in small batches with an intense amount of work going into every single jar. 

Food’s carbon footprint is measured by the greenhouse gas emissions produced by growing, rearing, farming and processing, transporting, storing, cooking and disposing of the food we eat. 

Bees&Co. Wild Countryside honey is the winner of a Great Taste Award and has iconic clients selling and using  the honey from within the hospitality sector, including The Ned hotel, Michelin-star Restaurant Story and Nobu Hotel in London.

This Author

Marianne Brooker is a commissioning editor for The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Bees for Business. The honey is available to buy direct to wholesale suppliers via the Bees for Business website  www.beesforbusiness.com

Marine Antarctic animals closely associated with sea ice for food or breeding, such the humpback whale and emperor penguin, are most at risk from the predicted effects of climate change, a new study published in Frontiers in Marine Science has found. 

Using risk assessments like those used for setting occupational safety limits in the workplace, scientists from the British Antarctic Survey determined the winners and losers of Antarctic climate-change impacts, which includes temperature rise, sea-ice reduction and changes in food availability.

Their research shows that seafloor predators and open-water feeding animals, like starfish and jellyfish, will benefit from the opening up of new habitat.

Climate change 

Dr Simon Morley, lead author, based at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), UK, said: “One of the strongest signals of climate change in the Western Antarctic is the loss of sea ice, receding glaciers and the break-up of ice shelves.

“Climate change will affect shallow water first, challenging the animals who live in this habitat in the very near future. While we show that many Antarctic marine species will benefit from the opening up of new areas of sea floor as habitat, those associated with sea ice are very much at risk.”

A growing body of research on how climate change will impact Antarctic marine animals prompted the researchers to review this information in a way that revealed which species were most at risk. 

Seabird ecologist Mike Dunn is co-author of this study, which forms part of a special article collection on aquatic habitat ecology and conservation. Dunn said: “We took a similar approach to risk assessments used in the workplace, but rather than using occupational safety limits, we used information on the expected impacts of climate change on each animal. 

“We assessed many different animal types to give an objective view of how biodiversity might fare under unprecedented change.”

Robust pioneers

They found that krill — crustaceans whose young feed on the algae growing under sea ice — were scored as vulnerable, in turn impacting the animals that feed on them, such as the Adèlie and chinstrap penguins and the humpback whale. The emperor penguin scored as high risk because sea ice and ice shelves are its breeding habitat.

Dunn added: “The southern right whale feeds on a different plankton group, the copepods, which are associated with open water, so is likely to benefit. Salps and jellyfish, which are other open-water feeding animals are likely to benefit too.”

The risk assessment also revealed that bottom-feeders, scavengers and predators, such as starfish, sea urchins and worms, may gain from the effects of climate change.

Dr David Barnes, co-author of this research, said: “Many of these species are the more robust pioneers that have returned to the shallows after the end of the last glacial maximum, 20,000 years ago, when the ice-covered shelf started to melt and retreat. 

These pioneer species are likely to benefit from the opening of new habitats through loss of sea ice and the food this will provide.”

Next step

Barnes continued: “Even if, as predicted for the next century, conditions in these shallow-water habitats change beyond the limits of these species, they can retreat to deeper water as they did during the last glacial maxima.

“However, these shallow-water communities will be altered dramatically – temperature-sensitive animals with calcium shells were scored as the most at risk if this happens.”

As more information becomes available, the researchers hope to improve their predictions.

Morley explained: “The next step is to assign weights to the factors and predicted impacts. For example, temperature is a factor that has major effects on cold-blooded marine animals, but will it be more of a problem than the benefit from loss of sea ice? It is very difficult to know until we have more data.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from Frontiers. The full report can be read here. 

Textiles connect people. They are part of our everyday lives. They are also part of a journey and become threadbare. This leads to the idea of ‘bearing witness’, recognising the importance of stories of migration and allowing those stories to be told.

Of course, textiles themselves migrate, through historical trade routes. These threads have been exported and imported, these patterns are in our everyday lives. The title of our project Thread Bearing Witness is about the connecting thread of people.

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The project includes three key pieces, ‘GROUND’, ‘SEA’ and ‘SKY’. They have a human scale, so you feel within them. ‘GROUND’ and ‘SKY’ are informed by refugees’ contributions of imagery and textile cultural heritage for a collective common ground of making. ‘SEA’ is the only one made by me alone. It emerged from the saturation of media imagery from that period of time in 2016. Everyone remembers those incredible images coming through the media daily of the horror of people in the sea.

Refugee support

The three pieces reflect my increasing involvement with individuals. I had to start making ‘SEA’ before I met any of the refugees. They took part in the project through ‘GROUND’ and ‘SKY’. This was because the pieces take a huge amount of time to make and I had to begin.

So there were practical considerations to take into account, but in a way I think that’s quite interesting, since the project is about learning through the voices of others, changing perspectives and representing those who contribute as truly as I could. The works open a space for others to enter and participate within.

My daughter, Tamsin Koumis, introduced me directly to the experience of refugee issues. She has a background of working with migrants and refugees and set up the Dunkirk Legal Support Team, which enabled access to human rights at the refugee camp in France. Her organisation has connections to various individuals who have come to this country.

I met up with them and carefully discussed how they might want to contribute to the project. It was very much led by them. I started meeting up with a group of Syrian women in my home town and continue to meet them weekly. I’ve become very close to them. I did some training with a refugee support group, Southampton & Winchester Visitors Group, since I was very aware that I needed to understand safeguarding and delicate, sensitive issues of trauma and culture.

There is no blueprint for how people have been participating. I’ve had to recognise we’ve got to treat each contribution very differently and to be open and led by each participant.

Resilience Collective

One contributor is Saamiullah Khan, an unaccom­panied minor from Kandahar, Afghanistan,who was in the Dunkirk camp and eventually came to the UK thanks to the Dunkirk Legal Support Team and others.

Khan had to leave Afghanistan because of the Taliban. His mother and sisters are still there. His father died in the UK. Saami is an extraordinary young man. He is truly gifted, and has a great sense of responsibility for his family, whom he is missing terribly.

We did various activities together. He wanted to design a piece of work and asked his family in Kandahar to stitch it into a beautiful cloth with the Afghan map at the centre. With Tamsin he wrote about Afghan embroidery. His circumstances were very compromised and difficult and we’ve now lost touch with him. So it’s been heart-rending.

I went with Tamsin to PIKPA refugee camp in Lesvos, Greece.That was very different. We made different things every day, building up trust with the residents. I now send out art and sewing materials, wool and crochet hooks so that the camp can continue making. Much of the project exists outside what is actually represented in the exhibition, and I feel that’s really important.

We wanted to include those who just wanted to be part of the project but aren’t refugees themselves. So we devised the Stitch a Tree project, inspired by the work of Refugee Resilience Collective, a group of narrative psychologists and psychotherapists working in the Calais camp. They held drawing workshops with children and used the tree of life as a narrative therapy tool, describing it as a symbol of strength, life and nourishment.

Stitch a tree

For the Stitch a Tree project, we invited people to contribute stitched trees. These form a collective forest, whichreflects the ideathat we are all individuals but we come together as a shared world. We expected 200 to 300 contributions, but there are now about 5,000.

We have had trees sent to us from groups of schoolchildren who have never stitched before, and beautiful exquisite contributions from experts. It’s multicultural, cross-generational and across genders. This has been a really extraordinary wave of human support, and it is still growing – it’s almost unstoppable.

Meeting with refugees has made me constantly reflect back on my own privilege. It can be very troubling to feel a helplessness to make change. Equally, we feel inspired by people who are living through traumatic circumstances. We are constantly asking ourselves if what we are doing is actually helping.

This notion of bearing witness and authenticity has been hard to negotiate and is very sensitive. I’m not an expert in migration. I’m just an artist. I can’t resolve these issues, but I can show that I care.

Textiles is a medium that has a really powerful presence. It’s a unique kind of activism holding sensitivities and nuances of soft voices that can be repressed and hidden, yet vocalised through this medium. These are the voices that can bear witness to all of those individuals who might not have a voice elsewhere.

This Author 

Alice Kettle is a contemporary textile/fibre artist based in the UK. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. Thread Bearing Witness is at the Whitworth Gallery at the University of Manchester until 24 February 2019. 

To see the need for change and head towards it, you have to ask the obvious, simple questions.

That’s what was done at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, when the campaigning group Feedback asked colleagues from the Soil Association, Friends of the Earth, Biovale and the Committee on Climate Change, “what is land for?”

It was clear from the discussion was that much of Britain’s land-use is far from optimal, a result of historical circumstances rather than any sort of rational choices for today.

Sugar beet

A farmer in the audience pointed out that a significant proportion of what’s now termed farmland only came into that use during the Second World War, when the nation was battling to beat the U-boats by feeding itself. 

As another contributor noted, financial incentives meant drainage of deeply unsuitable wetlands, the last of the last left, continued until the early 1980s. When the funding stopped, so did the drainage, like a stone dropped into one of the few remaining ponds.

That left us with only a tiny proportion of the wetland – the land vital for birds and other wildlife, for flood control, for carbon storage – of even decades before. The conference session didn’t even get started on house building on the greenbelt.

Even some of the best agricultural land being used for farming is being put to far from ideal purposes. A case study – and boy is it a disaster story – is that of sugar beet.

This is an immensely destructive crop, responsible for 10 percent of the total loss of soil in England from agricultural lands. Being a root crop, harvested in autumn in generally wet conditions, large amounts of the surrounding soil is picked up with the beet. So much, in fact, that British Sugar has a steady little earner sideline in selling the soil collected during processing.

So some of the richest, best agricultural soil in the land is being stripped away, to end up on golf courses or landscaping in new office blocks. And this for a crop producing empty, damaging calories. 

Improving our diets

The average British child by age 10 has consumed as much sugar as they should by age 18, as emerged with considerable fanfare last week. We don’t need more of it, and yet British Sugar is hoping to increase production by 50 percent.

Put the land used for sugar beet – even half of it – to growing vegetables biointensively, on the model of Bec Hellouin or Bio-Gemusehof, and it could make a huge impact on our huge deficit of fruit and vegetable supply for even our utterly inadequate consumption levels. It would create the opportunity for huge numbers of extra small businesses, and jobs, at the same time restoring rural communities hollowed out by consolidation of farms into larger and larger blocks.

The misuse problem isn’t just of land of course. A lot of the food is going into feeding animals, to produce a far smaller quantity of meat. Stopping that and eating the grain instead would produce far more calories, but of course calories aren’t what we need.

We need modest amounts of protein – considerably less than we consume now – which means growing more pulses and beans: Hodmedods is showing the way in that, recovering once-common crops that had been almost forgotten and improving the British diet at the same time.

What we also need is wildlife, and that means identifying the most appropriate land for rewilding, mostly with trees. Sometimes that will be the marginal land, sometimes parts adjoining existing woodland or corridors linking it, broadening the areas accessible to our wildlife. Of course that will also, essentially, store carbon to help to meet our legally binding emissions targets. 

Some land – including those new woodlands – can be used (very carefully) for sustainable, local, small-scale biofuel. 

Moving forward 

One of the first things we need is research, understanding, and measures of the environmental impact, not just in soil damage and climate emissions, but also contributions to eutrophication and air pollution, to flooding and wildlife.

We also need to be able to consider the nutritional benefits of a crop – beetroot far better than sugar beet, protein-rich lentils far better than standard wheat for Chorleywood process bread.

The answer has to lie in the fact that growing the wrong crop on the wrong soil in the wrong place has real costs. Some of those costs are borne by the farmer – but lots of them are carried by the rest of us in climate change and pollution impacts from the production and use of nitrogen fertiliser, in lost soil that won’t be replaced for millennia, in flooding, in obesity, ill-health and NHS costs.

A system that makes the profiter pay – that rewards farmers for producing nutritionally rich healthy food while ensure they don’t load costs on the rest of us – is clearly what’s needed.

In the sketched outline of the Agriculture Bill, there’s just a hint of the beginning of a scheme that could head the rich way. We must apply appropriate taxes to the production of surplus food and food that is produced in damaging ways (say for unsustainably produced meat, as Green MP Caroline Lucas was suggesting), and cut taxes and costs for those products that we do need. 

This isn’t easy and it isn’t simple. But given climate change, given our acute levels of nutritional dysfunction and the degradation of land, soils, air and water – there really isn’t any alternative.

This Author 

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

Dog food containing grubs mixed with oats and potato has been launched today, in the latest development in the trend to lower the environmental impact of food.

The insects in the pet food by Yora are reared in the Netherlands, and contain protein, fats, minerals and amino acids. They live on vegetable matter that would otherwise go uneaten, reaching full size in 14 days, removing the need for growth hormones or antibiotics often found in meat, according to Yora.

Dog and cat food contributes around 25-30% of the environmental impacts from animal production, in terms of the use of land, water, fossil fuel, phosphate and biocides, and releases significant amounts of the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, according to a study by professor Gregory Okin from the University of California.

Weekly shop

When compared to beef farming, insect-based pet food needs just two percent of the land and four percent of the water to produce each kilogramme of protein, which means they generate 96 percent fewer greenhouse emissions, according to a study carried out by Protix, which supplies the insects used in Yora’s dog food. 

The Food and Agriculture Organisation, part of the UN, has also produced a study highlighting the environmental benefits of insect food. Tom Neish, founder of Yora, said: “Animals and humans have been eating insects since the dawn of time and we believe Yora is the future of pet food.”

The idea of eating insects in Western diets has been gaining traction recently. In November, Sainsburys began stocking roasted crickets for human consumption by Eat Grubs citing its own research which found that 42 per cent of people would be willing to try eating insects, with seven per cent willing to add them to their weekly shop if they were easily available.

This Author

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

Ice, plunging temperatures and harsh winds – it doesn’t seem like the right time for vulnerable, soft new life.

My daughter was born at this time of year, in the midst of a big freeze. My dad, a farmer, had been on standby in case I needed a tractor to get me through the deep snow to hospital. Luckily, the roads thawed just in time for her arrival.

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Now she is seven and my companion, along with her older brother, on our yearly pilgrimage to Horsey. Together we battle the coastal wind to climb the dunes, along with crowds of other people. We are rewarded with our favourite Nature spectacle: hundreds of grey seal pups and their parents on the beach.

Haul-out

Every year, the seals come here to give birth. It’s known as a rookery, but having experienced the heavy, ungainly feel of late pregnancy myself, I prefer the other descriptive term: a haul-out. About half the world’s population of grey seals are found around Britain, and this site is really important.

It’s got cute factor, with the fluffy white pups rolling over and seeming to wave at us with a flipper, their dark, liquid eyes like pools of innocence. Their perfect, white fur is a reminder that they evolved thousands of years ago and would originally have been born in a colder climate, onto snow.

There is plenty of humour here as well, with the comical lolloping of the adults, flopping themselves onto the sand with clumsy movements, but there is sadness too, as we notice the carcass of a pup.

I think the children enjoy it best of all when the male bulls fight, bumping each other with their blubbery chests and making strange barking grunts. It’s a scene that gets recreated in my living room for weeks afterwards.

The males are vying for a space nearest the females, for soon after the pups are weaned it will be the mating season. Any pup who gets in the way of a bull could be injured or killed.

Ensuring protection 

It seems like a peculiar time of year to bring babies into the world, but after a summer of feasting on fish the mothers should be in peak condition for the challenges of rearing their young. They need to be.

The milk they produce is so rich – containing 60 percent fat – that a mother can lose over 50kg in weight in the few weeks she feeds her pup. Meanwhile, the pups can put on 2kg each day, building the thick layer of blubber they require for survival in the winter sea.

After the pups are weaned, the mothers return to the waves and leave them on the beach. This often causes well-meaning members of the public to panic that they have been abandoned. The pups still have a bit of growing up to do before they can take to the water. In three weeks or so, that fluffy white fur will moult, turning mottled grey and, crucially, waterproof.

Then the pups can head for the sea and learn to catch food. Mind you, it’s tough out there. The Friends of Horsey Seals report that more than half of the pups born won’t make it through their first year.

The seals need our protection, while on land and at sea. However adorable they look, we must keep our distance, with dogs strictly on leads. This beach operates a voluntary closure for the haul-out season, with appropriate viewing areas. We can think about marine life as a whole too, by reducing our plastic consumption, helping with beach litter picks and using marine-safe washing detergent.

Thankful for that blast of fresh air, cuteness and pure natural wonder, we head back to the warmth of home. We’ll be back to visit the seals next year.

This Author 

Kate Blincoe is a freelance nature and environment writer, and author of The No-Nonsense Guide to Green Parenting. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. 

Our planet has an abundance of animals that help ecosystems around the world thrive. What happens when they start to become endangered and even extinct?

In 2018 alone we saw three bird species go extinct: the Cryptic Treehugger, Alagoas Foliage-gleaner and the Hawaiin Po’ouli. We also saw the last male northern white rhino die at a wildlife sanctuary in Kenya in 2018 – with just two females left, there is no way to reproduce and continue this species now.

The Center for Biological Diversity has said: “We’re currently experiencing the worst spate of species die-offs since the loss of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago”. We must do something to fix this mass problem.

Survival rate

Giraffes have been added to the endangered species list, and numbers of the long-necked mammals have gone down by 40 percent over the last three decades, mostly as a result of human activity in their habitats. There survival rate is threatened by human poaching. 

eCo2 Greetings has created an interactive map that highlights some of the most endangered and critically endangered species around the world.

All of these animals play a vital part in our ecosystems and their existence is in our hands. So, how can we as a planet improve the future of their existence?

Take a look at the map here to see just what species are endangered and how each country can work together to save them.

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from eCo2 Greetings.

Symbiosis – an expanding network of revolutionary organisers and local initiatives –  is assembling a confederation of democratic community institutions across North America.

The emerging network consists of diverse groups and member organisations, from Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi to Olympia Assembly in Washington, who are participating out of a recognition of the need to carry the movement for radical democracy beyond the local level.

The project has been gathering support over the past year and will be launched at a continental congress in Detroit from 18 September of this year.

Shared vision

Z, a co-founder of Black Socialists of America (BSA), said: “It is imperative that any groups or organisations moving in a social or economic sense on the vision we share for a democratic and ecologically sound world not struggle on their own, but instead under a global support system aimed at both dismantling our exploitative socioeconomic system (Capitalism), and building a democratic, cooperative system in its place.

“Symbiosis is in a position to build this support system.” 

Symbiosis has now released a launch statement announcing the congress, initially signed by 14 organisations.

It states: “Over the course of the past year our organisations have been strengthening our relationships with one another, learning from each other, generating shared resources, and honing a common vision of how to create together the genuinely democratic world that we need.”

Beyond the shared vision of radical democracy and egalitarianism, what unites these groups is a common political strategy, of building institutions of popular power from below to challenge and replace the governing institutions of capitalist society.

Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson, said: “We have to move beyond the limitations of bourgeois democracy, particularly its representative forms, which intentionally limit the agency and power of communities and individuals in our societies.

“To get beyond these limitations we have to build democratic formations and practices in every facet of our lives—where we work, live, play, and pray — and utilize these formations to exercise dual power, that is utilising our own power and agency to govern our own lives beyond the limitations imposed upon us by the state and the forces of capital.” 

A shared commitment to building ‘dual power’ unites the member organisations of Symbiosis.

Formidable challenges

At the next congress delegates from grassroots organisations across North America will gather to form a confederation between their groups, to grow and coordinate a movement that can bring about a just, ecological, and free society.

Brian Tokar of the Institute for Social Ecology, a member organisation and sponsor of the event, said: “The problems we face today require a bold and unified response. We face the rising threats of authoritarianism and inequality, structural forms of domination between the haves and the have-nots, and the scapegoating and oppression of immigrants and people of color.

“We also know that the destabilization of the climate and the fossil-fuelled destruction of the Earth’s life support systems play a central role in all the problems we face.”

The idea behind the confederation is that these formidable challenges are insurmountable for individuals and small groups. Kelly Roache, a co-founder of Symbiosis, said: “By coming together, we can better recognize and organize the changes necessary to secure our future more than what any of us can do at the local level.”  

A common platform would also allow this growing movement to pool resources, raise their public visibility, and seed new organizing initiatives.

Local groups

The congress will prioritize local, democratically-run movements and organizations that are building new economic and political institutions, such as people’s assemblies, tenant unions, and cooperatives.

Local groups are invited to join the congress and sign on to the launch statement, and individuals can also join as members.

In April 2017, members of the Symbiosis Research Collective published the essay, Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond, which won first prize in the Next System Project essay competition.

Journalist and author Naomi Klein, who reviewed the essay, said that the Symbiosis vision “sketches out a flexible roadmap for scaling up participatory democracy”.

Over the past year, the network has grown to over 300 individual members, in addition to the 14 member and partner organisations who have signed onto the launch statement thus far.

The Symbiosis Research Collective has also published an ongoing series of articles with The Ecologist reaching an audience of more than 23,000 readers.

In July 2018, Symbiosis co-coordinated the Fearless Cities North America conference (NYC), which convened 300 municipalist activists from the U.S., Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Latin America. In December 2018, they started a crowdfunder to fund the congress.

Currently, members are working on developing resources and information for people who wish to begin organizing where they live and work.

Endless possibilities 

Mason Herson-Hord, another co-founder of Symbiosis and co-coordinator of the research collective, said: “By the time of the congress, the Symbiosis Research Collective will have put together an in-depth primer on community organizing and dual power institution-building, including important historical examples, practical guides, and the theoretical underpinnings of our revolutionary project.” 

In their launch statement, these authoring organizations write that the congress is only the beginning.

“Ultimately, we will need such a confederation to carry our struggle beyond the local level. Ruling-class power is organized globally, and if democracy is to win, we must be organized at that scale as well. As this project advances, the possibilities are endless.”

This author 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from Symbiosis. Symbiosis is a network of community organisations across North America, building a democratic and ecological society from the ground up. Find out more on their website. 

Dale Vince describes himself as a “head-down-getting-stuff-done kind of person”. This approach has certainly achieved a lot so far.

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The company he founded in 1996, Ecotricity, is Britain’s largest green energy company, supplying over 200,000 customers across Britain from a growing fleet of wind and sun parks.

Ecotricity has electric vehicle charge points in motorway service stations across the UK and funds what it describes as the world’s first vegan football team. Ecotricity’s electricity supply has been 100% green (as opposed to a mixture of green and ‘dirty’ energy) since 2013.

Political will

I spoke to Vince in the week that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its special report on climate change stating we have 12 years to keep global warming to a max­imum of 1.5 °C.

To achieve a fall in CO2 emissions to net zero, coal will need to be largely phased out by mid-century and renewables will have to meet the majority of future electricity supplies. It’s a pretty good recommendation for green energy suppliers like Ecotricity, but to achieve it requires political will.

“The current [UK] government and the previous government under David Cameron have been pulling us in the total opposite direction, shutting down the onshore wind and solar industries and promoting fracking for all it’s worth, when in fact we can’t afford to burn the fossil fuel reserves we know of,” said Vince. “We certainly don’t need to find more.”

Ecotricity provides “frack-free” green gas and has set up a People Power Fund to support activists on the front line. At the time of our interview, three men were facing jail terms for causing a “public nuisance” after taking part in an anti-fracking protest. They were later freed on appeal.

As an alternative to fracking, in 2016 Ecotricity launched its Green Gas initiative, which involves anaerobic digesters breaking down grass to produce biogas by “cropping marginal land for its grass three times a year, creating great nature habitats in the process”.

A typical 5MW Green Gasmill will require about 3,000 acres of grassland to supply 3,500 homes with all the gas they need, according to the company. “We haven’t built one yet, but we’ve got planning permission and we’re hoping to start one before very long,” Vince said.

Pushing for change

Transport is another frontier. Private electric vehicle ownership has increased a lot since the Nemesis– built by Ecotricity engineers – became the fastest electric vehicle in the UK in 2012.

Even so, we are still in the very early days of electric car adoption, according to Vince. Again, the UK government seems to be dragging its feet on pushing for change, scrapping grants to buy low-emissions vehicles just months after publishing its Road to Zero strategy. Nevertheless, Vince is optimistic.

“I think we’re heading up an exponential curve actually and next year will see a big uptake as a whole raft of new models come on the market from the major manufacturers, with ranges of 300km [and] that can charge in about 20 minutes.” Ecotricity has certainly been at the forefront of developments. It provides more than 300 charging points for electric cars. It has not, however, invested in public transport.

Diet is also a big theme for the company. Vince himself has been vegan for “three or four decades”. This year the company announced accreditation from The Vegan Society. “It began with a story about dead fish in fish farms in Scotland being used by [Scottish energy company] SSE. We dug further and found slurry in pig farms and abattoir waste [being used in anaerobic digesters].” This, he said, affected millions of people.

“We knew the use of slurry went on, but the extent of it was a surprise.” As a response, the company audited its supply chain to make sure it was free of these ingredients, instead using ingredients like vegetable waste, maize and grass, and in July announced the ‘world’s first’ vegan tariff.

Anaerobic digestion

In response, the anaerobic digestion industry said the process was there to make the best of agricultural and other organic wastes, not to cause them in the first place. “In an ideal world, there would be no need for our industry,” said Charlotte Morton, chief executive of the Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association.

“But where these wastes are produced – and they are, in huge quantities – it’s critical that they are recycled through anaerobic digestion, which gets by far the most out of them compared to other waste treatment technologies, into renewable energy and soil-restoring biofertiliser rather than left wasted and untreated to release climate-change-inducing methane into the atmosphere.”

Vince said the response from the industry had been “kind of a lame defence. The intensive farming of animals is an abomination and the conditions they are kept in is appalling,” he said.

“It’s also having a huge impact on the environment. So they were defending something that I think is indefensible, saying we produce all this slurry so we’ve got to do something with it, when we say don’t produce it in the first place.”

Facing the realities of climate breakdown is terrifying, so I ask Vince how he stays upbeat and motivated. “I don’t let stuff get me down,” he said. “There are too many things to do, too many battles to fight.” In the challenging months ahead, the world will need much more of this positive energy.

This Author

Marianne Brown is editor of Resurgence & Ecologist. The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now! You can listen to the interview on the Resurgence Voices podcast: resurgence.podiant.co

The potential for technological development to play a positive role in future societies has been enjoying a revival in alternative political discussions of late.

Optimistic, imaginative conceptions of the future are important, and provide a much needed source of hope and inspiration in the context of impending environmental catastrophe and the continued dominance of capitalism. They’re a welcome change from ecological perspectives that suffer from a somewhat dim view of technology and the future in general.

But these new visions can too easily mistake technology as the solution to ecological problems, rather than accompanying and supporting  broader social and political approaches.

Capitalist realism

So how can we free our imaginations from the grip of capitalist realism – the idea that capitalism is the only viable option for organising society?

How can we picture possible future worlds and the role that technology will play in them, while keeping our imagined worlds grounded in social and ecological realities?

For example, not forgetting that we are living on a planet with limited natural resources or that we have to consider how to make these imagined futures real.

Three recently written pieces explore some of these themes: “Fully Automated Green Communism” by Aaron Bastani,“Accelerationism… and Degrowth? The Left’s Strange Bedfellows” by Aaron Vansintjan and “Pulling the Magic Lever”, by Rut Elliot Blomqvist.

Initially a tongue in cheek provocation, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) has morphed into a serious proposition about how technology and automation could be used to provide for everyone’s needs and free people from the drudgery of wage labour.

Bastani’s piece attempts to counter some of the ecological critiques of the idea, arguing that FALC can be green. Instead of trying to halt the progress of technological development and reduce energy consumption, Aaron argues that we should ride the technological horse to move beyond scarcity, proposing a kind of accelerationism where technology is rapidly advanced in order to bring about radical social change.

Shared ideas

In “Accelerationism… and Degrowth? The Left’s Strange Bedfellows”, Aaron Vansintjan looks at accelerationist ideas like FALC and compares them to ‘degrowth’, evaluating the similarities and differences between the two frameworks.

Degrowth is a movement that has emerged from environmentalism and alternative economics and is focused on theorising and creating non-growth based economies and societies.

Although accelerationism and degrowth are apparently opposed, Vansinjtan finds some shared ideas, including their recognition of the need for deep, systemic change, their calls for democratisation of technology and their rejection of ‘work’ (or at least the idea that work is inherently good).

The key differences centre around accelerationism’s focus on reappropriating technology to achieve a resource-unlimited society, versus degrowth’s aim of limiting the development of certain forms of technology and staying within resource constraints.

Degrowth also seeks to slow the metabolism of society, whereas accelerationism aims to increase the pace of social change. Ultimately, while supportive of accelerationism’s inspiring vision, Vansinjtan finds it seriously lacking in dealing with ecological critiques.

Design fiction

Rut Elliot Blomqvist examines three different visions of possible future worlds and the role that technology plays in them. ‘Pulling the Magic Lever’ is a reference to how technology is used to answer social or ecological problems without explaining how it will do so: you simply ‘pull the magic lever’ of technology and hey presto, it’s all solved. It’s a running theme in all three of the imagined futures Blomqvist chooses to analyse.

The first is in The World We Made, a novel by environmentalist Jonathon Porrit, then The Venus Project, a technology based political proposition, and finally Fully Automated Luxury Communism. In their analysis, Blomqvist uses a World Systems Theory approach to evaluate the ideas, critiquing the story of modernisation by framing it around colonialism.

The World We Made is based on Design Fiction, where fiction inspires possibilities of new designs. It sees the human species in general as the villain responsible for destroying the environment. In the novel’s fantasy scenario, however, humans manage to turn things around and start to use technology and various existing world institutions for the common good.

As Elliot points out, this book flags up an important discussion around the idea of the ‘anthropocene’ (a proposed name for a new human-affected geological epoch), which may support the view that the human species in general is the problem, rather than certain humans or, say, a capitalist growth-based economy. They also describe the book’s tendency towards technological optimism: it presents technology as providing the answers, without explaining how, and ignores the socio-cultural-political reasons for current ecological destruction.

The Venus Project is found to be even further along the techno-optimist spectrum and again ignores how its proposed technological utopia might be brought into existence. As well as highlighting its fetishisation of the scientific process, Elliot explains how The Venus Project often engenders conspiracy theories, a number of which are dangerously close to anti-Semitism.

Non-capitalist automation 

Continuing the trend, FALC is found to involve similar techno-utopianism, where the working classes seize the means of production and use automation to create a world of plenty.

Elliot points to a blind spot, as FALC doesn’t consider the limits of post-industrialism beyond the western world. Elliot describes how all three rely heavily on ‘pulling the magic lever’, and while they show imagination, they are also limited by the fossil-fuelled mentality they seek to criticise.

To finish, here are a few general questions reflecting on these discussions around technology and the role it might play in future ecologically sustainable societies.

The role of human agency is often missing in visions of techno utopias, so how can control of and production of technology be changed, how will these imagined futures be made real? How can technology’s potential within the ecological and degrowth movements be highlighted and developed, promoting positive future visions and countering environmentalism’s ‘hair shirt’ image?

Should it be assumed that technologies will inevitably be developed, or should certain developments be hindered or prevented, and if so, how? For example, can we change the basis on which automation takes places and is implemented? Is non-capitalist automation possible, and if so, do we want it? How could it be made non-capitalist?

Finally, instead of being seen as competing positions, how can ecological and technologically based visions of the future back together?

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Corporate Watch is a not-for-profit co-operative providing critical information on the social and environmental impacts of corporations and capitalism. Since 1996 our research, journalism, analysis and training have supported people affected by corporations and those taking action for radical social change.

Corporate Watch is currently working on a technology project, if you are interested in knowing more or collaborating on future work, please email contact@corporatewatch.org.