If you’ve decided to try Veganuary this year, congratulations and thank you. You’ve taken up a resolution that not only benefits yourself but also saves the lives of others.

The Ecologist’s very own editor, Brendan Montague, is currently trying a vegan diet for the month, prompted and helped by wonderful Ecologist readers. He’s not alone – 200,000 people have joined his this year so far, with numbers growing rapidly.

It’s important, particularly for those of us who care about the environment, to really consider the impact that our food choices have on the planet and those living on it – going vegan is one of the most significant actions an individual can take to combat climate change.

Even mainstream retailers like Greggs and McDonald’s have recognised that there is demand for vegan products, with their respective launches of a £1 vegan sausage roll and a vegan Happy Meal last week. No more excuses that vegan living is inconvenient or expensive!

Being vegan can be extremely rewarding when done right – so here are my tips how to make this happiness last beyond Veganuary.

1. Keep it exciting

The world of vegan food is more exciting than most people think – it’s an amazing opportunity to build on what you consider as food and learn new recipes.

As meat-eaters, we probably took food for granted and simply saw it as part of our daily routine but when you go vegan, every meal is a joy.  

If you’re not the cooking type, don’t worry because there are plenty of ready-made quick vegan meals available too.

Make sure to look into supermarket frozen sections for burgers and sausages; refrigerated sections for lunch on the go and meat alternatives; and snack aisles for a wide range of vegan friendly products.

On your next trip to the supermarket, why not look out for soya milk instead of cow’s milk? Trying out all the different options is an exciting experiment. If you don’t like soya or want a change you could always try almond, coconut, oat, hemp, hazelnut or rice milk next.

2. Make it easy 

Some people see going vegan as a challenge because they think it involves learning a whole lot of new recipes and using a range of new ingredients they don’t have the time to find.

But there is a simple and fun shortcut to going vegan – you can just replace the few non-vegan ingredients in your recipes to still enjoy the good old favourites.

You probably don’t realise this, but you actually eat a lot of vegan food already and anything you eat can be made vegan.

There are cruelty-free, delicious alternatives to anything you can think of from dairy-free spreads, to plant milk and yogurt, to vegan meat alternatives and cheeses.

Becoming a vegan isn’t about limiting or depriving yourself so make sure you start by replacing animal products; after a couple of weeks it will become as natural as anything.

3. Ingredient-swapping 

Whether at home, at a friend’s, or eating out, meals can often be easily veganised by removing one or two ingredients, or replacing them with their vegan counterparts. It’s handy to know what and how to do this, so here are some ideas:

• Swap the cheese on pizza for vegan cheese (available in most supermarkets) and top with lots of vegetables and olives
• Swap meat or seafood in a curry for chickpeas or lentils
• Cashew nuts can be used to add protein and flavour to stir-fried vegetables and rice noodles
• Dairy-free spread (such as Flora, Pure or Vitalite) and soya milk can be used to make mashed potatoes creamy
• Try houmous instead of butter in sandwiches
• Vegetable soup can be served with a swirl of soya cream or coconut milk
• Garlic bread can be created using dairy-free spread or olive oil
• Replace eggs, including banana, jam, apple sauce and tofu
• A lot of ready-made roll-out pastry is accidentally vegan.

4. Know where to eat out

There’s a good chance these days that the outlet you’re visiting already has vegan options but check online if it’s your first time there. If they don’t have anything exciting, the chef should be happy to prepare something for you. Make sure to call in advance and request this to make things easier.

Travelling or new to the city? Just download the app HappyCow – an online directory of vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants, cafés, shops and more – or check their website.

South and East Asian (particularly Thai, Chinese and Indian) cuisines are most likely to be rich in vegan options. Being nice to the waiter and explaining what you’re expecting from them can go a long way. Can you spot a menu item that’d be it vegan if it wasn’t for an ingredient or two? Ask them to swap or remove it for you and voila, you’ve created yourself a vegan meal. Don’t forget to check all the side dishes too – some may be real gems.

Zizzi, Pizza Hut and Pizza Express serve pizzas topped with vegan cheese, with the former sporting a huge vegan menu, while YO! Sushi, Bella Italia, Prezzo and Pho all provide great options. Wagamama, Frankie & Benny’s, Nando’s and ASK Italian all have delicious vegan menus.

In terms of pubs, Wetherspoons paves the way with its dedicated vegan menu, followed by Loungers, Harvester, Cosy Club, Sizzling Pubs, and even the meat-heavy places like Toby Carvery and Beefeater. Subway, YO Sushi, Wasabi, LEON and Bagel Nash are all great for lunch. If you’re looking for something more standard, you can head to coffee chains or supermarkets – every one of them offers vegan lunch options now.

5. Make vegan friends

Whether it’s in real life, through Facebook groups, apps, or local vegan meet-ups, making friends with similar interests is important.

Why not reach out to that person who keeps posting vegan food on Instagram?

They’re likely more than happy to chat to you about veganism.

If you want to be a little more pro-active, you can try searching for local meet-ups and surfing through forums, posting about wanting to meet up.

After all, who best to exchange recipes, ideas and talk about vegan problems with!

6. Find help online

Vegans are a very welcoming and helpful bunch, always ready to answer all the difficult questions or vegan dilemmas.

There are online forums and Facebook groups to join – it’s a good idea to search Facebook for a group in your area, e.g. ‘vegan London’.

There are some great resources out there, such as The Vegan Society’s VeGuide app which is free to download on Android and iOS devices.

Users receive a combination of daily informational videos, motivational quotes, quizzes, recipes and discounts, all of which aim to help you ease into vegan living.

If the tips above still leave you puzzled, feel free to contact us at The Vegan Society and we’ll be more than happy to help on your vegan journey – we’re on info@vegansociety.com or 0121 523 1730.

This author

Dominika Piasecka is media and PR officer at The Vegan Society and a keen vegan activist. If you care about the environment and want to learn about how veganism benefits it, take our seven-day planet-saving challenge here.

Environmentalists and community activists have claimed a major victory after the closure of an incinerator in Commerce, a city in the state of Los Angeles, USA –  a location as famous for its smog as its celebrities.  

The burner has been emitting contaminants above the legal maximum ever since it began operating in 1986, damaging the lives of people in the already overburdened surrounding community, they argue. But the people fought back and finally convinced Commerce to not renew its contract with the facility.

Unfortunately, there are still 76 similar garbage-burning plants across the US, notorious for emitting way too much. Another pattern is that the lower income communities and communities of color are disproportionately hit.

“No community should have to breathe in the pollution from other people’s garbage,” says Laura Cortez of East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, the community organization that led the charge to defeat the Commerce incinerator.

Renewable energy

Her colleague Whitney Amaya added: “Communities have always been at the forefront of enacting positive change by standing together and fighting against facilities that threat our health and environment. The Commerce Incinerator shutdown not only serves as a model for other communities facing similar issues, but is also another clear example of community power and victory.”

Opportunities for ending incineration are rising, as a generation of incinerators is coming to the end of their normal lifespans. Cities hold the key. They need to choose between a lock-in of decades of harmful pollution or leaping forward by closing the incinerators. That’s not as hard as it may seem.

Studies show that more than 90 percent of materials currently disposed of in incinerators and landfills can be reused, recycled, and composted. Incineration actually destroys valuable resources and causes emissions of dangerous chemicals like mercury, dioxins and ultra-fine particles.

Contrary to the claims made by the big companies who run them, incinerators make our climate change problem a lot worse. Compared to coal, waste incineration produces twice as much carbon pollution per unit of energy.

Amazingly, these companies get subsidies for causing climate change because they brand themselves as renewable energy producers. In that process, they take money away from investments in real renewable energy like solar and wind.

Another incinerator

To make things worse, they locked both greenhouse gas emissions and waste production in, by writing in the contracts that the cities provide a minimum amount of waste in order to keep the facilities operational.

On top of that, incinerators are so costly that they even contributed to the bankruptcy of cities like Detroit and Harrisburg. Detroit’s incinerator is so bad that it exceeded emissions limits more than 750 times over the last five years.

When the health costs are included, the costs go ballistic. As an example: healthcare expenses related one facility’s emissions has costed Maryland $21.8 million annually. That is over half a billion during a normal lifespan of 30 years.

The good news is that people are fighting back against the dinosaur waste-burning machines and they are winning significant gains.

In Baltimore, a group of high school students won against the incinerator company Energy Answers, who wanted to build yet another incinerator in Baltimore.

Subsidies

The proposed plant would have burned 4,000 tons of solid waste per day, making it the largest incinerator ever built. It would have been built right next to schools, parks and homes in a neighborhood that already suffers the worst air pollution levels in the state. This madness was fortunately stopped before it ever became a reality.

Destiny Watford, one of the key leaders in the fight, won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize for her work in 2016. She didn’t stop there.

After founding the student group Free Your Voice, she and her fellow students and community members are building recycling programs and working with the city to install other zero waste systems that would make the existing incinerator, BRESCO, obsolete.

Just this fall, the city was awarded a scholarship to build a new program to reduce food waste through waste reduction, composting, and food donations.

Thanks to community efforts to educate policymakers on the dangers of the city’s incinerator, the Maryland Congress considered a bill to strip incinerators in the state of their “green energy” label that makes them eligible for subsidies.  

Zero waste

Back in Detroit, the group Breathe Free Detroit recently delivered a petition to Mayor Mike Duggan with nearly 15,000 signatures demanding he shut down the incinerator.

They also released a comprehensive report detailing the many emissions violations and other issues since it began operating in 1986.

At the same time, people know that just saying ‘no’ is not enough. Locals are also building solutions that focus on conserving natural resources, not burning them.

In 2014 the coalition Zero Waste Detroit worked with the city to roll out its first curbside recycling program. It helped to increase household participation to 20 percent, ahead of schedule.

Although communities continue to face incinerator pollution, the drumbeat for environmental justice and a transition to zero waste grows stronger every day.

Incinerators are closing across the country and cities are creating zero waste plans. There’s a sense of rising awareness that disposing waste and disposing whole communities are intertwined and that clean air is not a luxury but a right for all.

This Author

Claire Arkin is the Campaign and Communications Associate for GAIA (Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives). For more information on failing incinerators across the country, visit: no-burn.org. You can find more information on the Detroit incinerator in the Atlas of Environmental Justice.

The UK’s long-term food security will be in doubt if the agriculture bill does not include tough targets on animal welfare and the farming landscape, and to reverse the decline in natural resources, campaigners said this week.

The agriculture bill aims to establish a new system for farm payments once the UK leaves the EU. Environment secretary Michael Gove says that farmers will be paid for providing public benefits, including to the environment.

But campaigners fear that it does not go far enough on issues such as chemicals and contains no detail on implementation.

New talent

The Nature-Friendly Farming Network (NFFN) wants clear minimum standards to safeguard, maintain and enhance animal welfare, the farming landscape and the agricultural industry; measures to improve sustainability across the industry and reverse the declines in natural resources and ecosystems; and a requirement for the government to publish a progress report every five years.

Martin Lines, chair of the NFFN, said: “We can only guarantee long term food security by protecting and managing the natural assets which enable food production. If the Government does not amend the Bill to include minimum standards – and put a stop to the environmental degradation caused by intensive farming – British farmers will be in danger of losing their livelihoods.”

The NFFN, which has over 2,000 members a year after it was created, made the call at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, an event running alongside the more traditional Oxford Farming Conference but focusing on sustainability.

Strong regulation

Gove spoke at both conferences. He said that the UK was undergoing a fourth agricultural revolution, which needed to factor in environmental and social factors.

“This fourth agricultural revolution will require us to change the way we work on the land and invest in its future, will force us to reform the role of government in regulating and supporting farming; will demand new thinking and new talent in food production, and will, inevitably, require tough choices to be made,” he said.

He has commissioned Henry Dimbleby, founder of healthy fast food chain Leon, to draw up a new food strategy for the UK, he said.  A spokesperson for the environment department (Defra) said that its new farming policy would maintain strong regulation alongside proportionate enforcement.

This Author

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

Stand at a certain point along the dusty highway on the northern outskirts of Puerto Maldonado, a town in the Peruvian Amazon, and you’ll see trucks transporting huge quantities of wood regularly pulling up and stopping.

Sometimes there are as many as five or six trucks there, some carrying unprocessed logs, some sawn timber. The drivers, often with a wad of paperwork in one hand, climb down and potter off towards a nondescript regional government office.

This can happen all day, some days more than most, depending on the season. The wood is cut from logging concessions, indigenous communities and other harvest areas to the north – the heart of Peru’s great Madre de Dios region stretching all the way to Bolivia and Brazil. 

Widespread illegalities 

What the truck drivers are doing, there in a district called El Triunfo, is calling at a timber sector control post run by the regional government. They need to have their paperwork stamped by an official. Various exceptions aside, no wood in Peru should ever be transported unless it is accompanied by permits stating its point-of-origin, among other things.

At least, that’s the theory. But what if the permits have been falsified and the wood doesn’t really come from where they say it does? That means the wood is illegal and laundered: it appears to come from point A, perhaps a logging concession or indigenous community, when actually it comes from point B, C or D, such as a national park, communal reserve or a logging concession where no permission to log has been granted. 

For the last ten years, the only people consistently in a position to know if wood hasn’t come from where the transport permits say has been an independent government agency called the Organismo de Supervisión de los Recursos Forestales y de Fauna Silvestre (OSINFOR).

That is because OSINFOR inspectors, unlike anyone else, have regularly travelled into the Amazon to visit the harvest areas where the wood is purportedly extracted and to find the specific locations where each tree was standing, according to the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinates given in the harvest areas’ operating plans. How otherwise can you tell if the wood is really legal or not?

In making these inspections, OSINFOR has done more than anyone to expose the widespread illegalities and laundering that have dominated Peru’s timber sector for decades – and generated some powerful, well-organised and sometimes violent opposition.

Stripped of independence 

The statistics – up there on OSINFOR’s website for all to see – make for fascinating reading: thousands of inspections made, over 130,000 trees effectively “faked” in operating plans, and at least 2.5 million cubic metres of “unauthorised” wood identified.

Earlier this year it reported that 67 precent of the timber purportedly from the harvest areas that it inspected in 2016 and 2017 was “unauthorised” – down from a previous figure of almost 90 percent. 

The result of such impressive endeavours? To be stripped of its independence – so crucial to its effectiveness – by president Martin Vizcarra last month when he signed a Supreme Decree moving OSINFOR to the Ministry of Environment, following several years of such a threat knocking around.

This is arguably illegal under Peruvian law and violates the country’s so-called “Trade Promotion Agreement” (TPA) with the US, which states that OSINFOR must be “independent and separate.” 

The timing couldn’t have been more ironic. 2018 marked the ten-year anniversary of OSINFOR becoming independent, and the Decree was emitted at the same time as the United Nations climate change talks were taking place in Poland. Earlier in the year, UN Climate Change’s first Annual Report stated that deforestation and forest degradation “account for approximately 17 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than the transport sector.” 

Punitive measures 

No doubt about it, this has happened precisely because of what OSINFOR has been exposing. It is a major step back in protecting the Peruvian Amazon – the fourth biggest tropical forest worldwide after Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. 

But might Vizcarra et al backtrack? And how might the US respond? A statement by various organisations including the Environmental Investigation Agency and Global Witness – for whom I was working as a consultant until recently – is calling on “the Peruvian government to reconsider its decision and restore OSINFOR’s independence, while strengthening it in order to guarantee that no similar attempt will succeed in the future.” 

Politicians in the US are making similar calls. Just before Christmas, six Democrats, including John Lewis and Richard Neal, wrote to the US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer urging him to “insist that this brazen, bad faith decision be reversed formally”, describing it as a “flagrant attack” on the US-Peru TPA.

According to the Associated Press on 4 January, Lighthizer has responded to Neal by calling the decision “unacceptable” and saying the US has “forcefully communicated” its position to Peru. This case, the AP claims, “could mark a first for the US in taking potential punitive measures against an international partner accused of violating environmental protections in a free trade deal.”

This Author 

David Hill is a freelance journalist focusing on human rights and environmental issues across Latin America.

In the fifteen years since the Canadian ore mining company Dundee Precious Metals (DPM) began extracting ores in Bulgaria, the company’s relationships with the public and authorities have really evolved. 

Lyubomir Haynov, operation director of the local branch of the Canadian DPM, argues that the technologies applied in the new gold mine in Krumovgrad rate among the most advanced in the world.

Konstantina Gradeva-Vassileva, the Director for Sustainable Business Development, agrees: “We have learnt a lot about the environmental and social impact of mining”.

Local response

DPM is controlled by the Canadian billionaire Ned Goodman. The company bought the concession rights of the Chelopech ore mine – one of the big deposits of gold in Europe – in 2003. 

The price was set at 26 million dollars, and in several years the mine scored annual sales of hundreds of millions. Due to stark public dissent, the company failed to expand its Bulgarian production with cyanide technologies.

Instead, the Canadians acquired a smelter in Namibia, to which they ship the Chelopech concentrate containing gold, copper, and large amounts of arsenic. The ore mine in Krumovgrad, Bulgaria, in the Eastern Rhodope Mountain is the next phase of DPM expansion.

Initially, the locals opposed the mine, but a cunning PR strategy and some pressure from the authorities gradually changed their attitudes. Vasvi Ibriam, the mayor of the Sarnak village near the gold mine, said: “It’s true, people get annoyed by the rock blasts and the dust. But we have to endure this for the jobs’ sake.”

According to Vasvi, every man who wants to work now may get a job in Krumovgrad – not only at Dundee and its contractors but also at the new rubber factory or in the big municipal projects.

Environmental impacts

Unofficially, the operation in Krumovgrad will commence in full in the spring of 2019 with the opening of the flotation factory. The technology envisages lower environmental impacts: there will be no tailing pond, and the water used in the production process will be purified to drinking quality before being poured back into the nearby river. 

Haynov proudly stated that they are “certainly the first ore mine in Bulgaria to do this”.

The online system for environmental monitoring developed by the company reveals many cases of overshooting the permissible limits of fine particles around the mining site.

In addition, DPM created a fund worth $5 million to back up small and medium-scale local businesses. This social support might be inspired by the EBRD – last year the development bank entered the Dundee family by swapping an extended credit line for a 10-percent share in the company.   

No doubt, the investor’s efforts in Chelopech and Krumovgrad deserve praise. Still the Canadian company cannot turn into a saint overnight – neither in environmental nor social or fiscal senses.   

Arsenic levels 

In the summer of 2015, a mission of Bulgarian environmentalists visited the town of Tzumeb in Namibia to get a firsthand view of the DPM smelter situated there.

Unlike the Bulgarian branch – for whom public communications seem to be of highest priority to the company – the management of the African branch denied a meeting with the guests.

Nevertheless, with the help of local activists the mission proceeded to explore the biggest problem in Tzumeb – arsenic dust. The above photograph is an aerial picture of the arsenic dumpsite in Tzumeb.

The polymetallic ores of Chelopech have over five percent arsenic content, and the technology used in the Namibian smelter is not suited to process them safely.

When the high-grade arsenic concentrates from Bulgaria started to enter in the 2010s, the smelter’s workers felt the difference and energetically protested. The authorities intervened, and production volumes were halved. Yet from the beginning of 2014, the production volumes were set at two times the initial level.  

Toxic dust

In 2012, on the request of the union activist Oscar Kakunga (latter dismissed) a full-scale health examination of the smelter’s workers took place. 1,722 probes were taken, and in 69 percent of the cases the concentration of arsenic in the workers’ blood and urine exceeded 100 μg/g.

In the neighboring South Africa, the reference value for over-exposure to arsenic is 50 μg/g. The World Health Organization (WHO) holds that “a safe level of arsenic cannot be established”, since any exposure is extremely hazardous.

The management states that after 2014 the levels of arsenic in the workers’ urine have diminished without citing numbers, the EBRD takes that at face value. 

Several thousand tons of arsenic trioxide from Tzumeb are sold to Malaysia and South Africa to be used as pesticides, a substance not allowed in the EU. The Bulgarian mission managed to get hold of photos of the storage site for the surplus arsenic. Only several hundred meters from residential buildings, thousands of tons of arsenic are stored in ordinary sugar bags in the open – decaying under the African sun.   

Genady Kondarev, who took part in the Tzumeb investigation, recalled: “There was a colossal quantity of toxic dust piled on the site. After a couple of years under the hat of Dundee, this facility had almost entirely used up its storage site for arsenic waste. Since the shocking results of the medical tests in 2012, we haven’t heard about newer health checks with publicly accessible results regarding the arsenic levels in the worker’s organisms”. 

Corporate networks 

In addition to its low environmental standards and cheap labor, Namibia attracts foreign investors with zero tax rates. The smelter of Tzumeb lies in a Special Processing Zone, freed from corporate taxes and VAT.

The Human Development Index ranks Namibia 129th in the world, yet DPM – and thus its shareholder EBRD, a bank that explicitly states its social commitments – do not feel embarrassed by the fact that they deny the national budget the funds that might be used for healthcare or education purposes. 

The Tzumeb smelter also processes concentrates from the El Brocal mine in Peru, which has even higher arsenic content, as well as other sources.

The output of the smelter is “black copper” – an alloy refined up to 98.5 percent – which contains not only copper and gold but also several valuable rare earth metals. It is a mystery where the final processing to marketable ingots is taking place and, correspondingly, who collects the value of the rare earths. The only hint we get is from DPM’s corporate website, which states that it supplies “refineries in Europe and Asia”.  

Until recently, the output of the smelter was brought to the market by the Louis Dreyfus Company, the letter “D” in the notorious ABCD group of corporations that dominate the world’s food trade.

The Metal Department of Louis Dreyfus had operations in Peru, Namibia, Australia, Mexico, China etc., and scored high profits. However, in the middle of 2018 this metal division was sold to the Chinese NCCL Natural Resources Investment Fund. Prior to this, Dundee Precious Metals had stated that it has a long-term trade contract with Louis Dreyfus. The new destination of Bulgarian gold is obviously China. 

Black tax holes  

China already buys  uranium ores and other radioactive materials from Namibia worth 100 million dollar per annum.

The UNCTAD database – the UN body for trade and development – revealed that in the last years the annual copper exports from Namibia to Switzerland averaged 150 million dollars, plus 100 million dollars in copper concentrates. This trade flow will probably now turn to Asia. 

For the six years between 2012 and 2017, the ore mine in Chelopech generated nearly 1.1 billion euro incomes and 380 million euro profits before taxes. For the whole period, the company paid the Bulgarian budget 38 million euro in corporate taxes and 30 million euro in concession fees.

Excluding the taxes and social contributions on salaries, the state manages to collect only six percent of the value of the gold extracted from its earth. 

Tax optimization gathers pace when profits leave the low-tax Bulgarian environment. The Bulgarian Trade Registry revealed that DPM has two companies registered on the Curacao Island and another company called Vatrin Investment Ltd.based on the British Virgin Islands – owned by a cooperative with headquarters in the Netherlands. According to Dutch trade law, under certain circumstances cooperatives do not pay dividend taxes; there is also an option for Dutch cooperatives to avoid paying a tax on profits.  

Dundee Precious (Barbados) acquired the concession rights of the Chelopech deposit in 2003. With such an elaborate offshore network it is no wonder that while the Chelopech mine records annual profits in order of 35-45 million euro after taxes, the mother company based in Toronto declares only tiny profits or even loss.  

Across the seas

Every year 100 thousand tons of concentrate from Chelopech travel for 9,000 miles to reach Namibia, while that same amount arrives there from other places, including the Pacific coast of South America.

This is only a fraction of the world’s huge marine trade in ores and concentrates – a practice very inefficient in the ecological sense. The world still closes its eyes for issues like noise contamination of the seas, and the quality of the ship fuels, which are the main emitter of soot, Sulphur and Nitrogen oxides.

At least, the EBRD sees nothing worrying happening between the model ore mines in Bulgaria and the shiny golden bars.

The ore trade impacts also the global development patterns: poor countries specialize in delivering raw materials, the processing remains for regions with loose environmental standards, and the surplus value in the refining and marketing goes to the advanced. The established global free trade regime just cements the inequality in industrial development of the countries.     

The Krumovgrad ores will not be shipped to Tzumeb since their arsenic content is low. Indeed, there is something different in their case. A long and hard opposition of the stakeholders at last guaranteed the acceptable quality of the DPM extractive operations.

Daniel Popov, a Bulgarian NGO mining expert, said: “The management of DPM saw potential in being environmentally responsible. Krumovgrad is a lesson of how interacting with the locals and the NGOs might alter the initial business plans until they become acceptable for the whole society”.

Still, gold industry generates over two billion tons of solid waste, in addition to chemicals used in the extraction, transportation emissions, and the health damages of thousands of workers. Just one middle-sized gold mine like that in Krumovgrad will create 15 million tons of solid waste and over six million tons of tailings during its lifetime.

This Author 

Dimitar Sabev is a Bulgarian journalist and economist. This article is the result of a long-term collaboration between Sabev and Za Zemiata (Friends of the Earth, Bulgaria). 

Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday? This question has been posed to the British public each year since 2011, after David Cameron decided to construct a National Happiness Index, mooted to replace GDP as a measure of the nation’s wellbeing.

This attempt to quantify the experience of happiness in the individual was the impetus of Lynne Segal’s wonderfully affirming book Radical Happiness.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

“I began by looking into the promotion and measuring of happiness with the idea that it’s some quantifiable inner event,” Segal tells me. “I say, actually, no emotions are like that. All emotions are far more complex and mixed, far more contradictory. And what’s more, they have a public dynamic as well as a personal dynamic.”

Collective joy

This insight is central to the book’s subtitle, Moments of Collective Joy. For Segal, the idea that happiness can be individuated is a particularly pernicious aspect of neoliberalism.

On the contrary, she believes that joy is communal by nature, and that happiness in life can only come from recognition of our dependency on one another and on Nature.

“Everything I write is an argument for our need to recognise our ties to others, and that’s the only way to escape the gloomy ties to the self we’re pushed ever more into,” she tells me.

“Joy, it seems to me, is almost quintessentially collective,” she continues. “Even if it’s coming from something like the view from a mountaintop, we want to be able to share it. The more we can share something, the more it will stay and linger.”

This outlook explains Segal’s suspicion of what we might term as the ‘wellbeing industry’, in which unhappiness is to be treated as a personal defect that can be remedied through some combination of marketised medi­cine and mindfulness. In such an approach, structural issues that might have given rise to legitimate unhappiness are obscured. Segal sees things differently.

Socialist feminist

“With depression, like happiness, you have to look at it in a social context,” she says. “While there is always an individual dimension to individual suffering, the ways of dealing with it aren’t necessarily individual. We know it’s linked to unemployment, we know it’s linked to poverty.

“I’m not saying that we don’t personally suffer, because we certainly do. And we all have our own unique histories that are significant,” she concedes, careful not to dismiss the benefits of measures like cognitive behavioural therapy and antidepressants. “But this has to be seen in terms of the pressures that bear down on us, [and] we have to ask: why is it all so heavy?”

Despite her willingness to look into the gloom of our neoliberal society, you only need to spend an hour or so with Segal to know that you’re in the company of someone who knows something about happiness, punctuating almost every remark with a beaming, rolling chuckle as we sit in her lovingly tended garden.

A socialist feminist of age in the 1960s, she has retained a lifelong fondness for communal politics, a fondness that clearly gave rise to her views on collective joy today.

“My generation came of age criticising post-war consumerism, which seemed to go along with a lack of concern for anything other than status. This was the golden age of capitalism, in the 1960s, which was allowing young people more freedom, but at the same time already we were thinking: we don’t want our lives to be dictated by commodities.”

“We were anti-capitalist, because we wanted life to be meaningful and creative, and we wanted to care for others,” she says. “We wanted an egalitarian, caring, sharing politics.”

Radical acts

Today, it’s easy to feel like we’ve drifted some distance from these ideals. For Segal, however, even resistance in the face of despair can provide the conditions for radical acts of collective joy. Not only that, but it might even be key to a meaningful, lasting sense of happiness.

“The last decade or so has been a nightmare for so many, but it has also been a time of huge resistance, whether that’s Black Lives Matter or Sisters Uncut, or just people just taking to the streets like on the day after Trump’s election,” she explains.

“Rather than looking in at ourselves, and trying to make ourselves happy, we’re more likely to feel more alive and more engaged by looking out at the world and facing up to the calamities all around us, the calamities of the refugee crisis and the calamities of climate change.”

A sober engagement with the realities of our ties to one another is at the heart of Segal’s theory of happiness, especially in an age of atomisation like ours. That’s why she’s probably at her gloomiest when talking about austerity policies, which attack our ability to nurture those bonds through even the most primary acts of care.

This, she tells me, is the subject of her next book. “There’s a complete crisis in care at the moment,” she laments. “At its worst, with neoliberal policies and so-called welfare reform, young mothers are working longer and longer hours, which means you have to import care from elsewhere. This gives you a racialised dynamic, with people coming from poorer countries, leaving their own families and dependants behind, in order to take up the caring needs in the first world.”

Care crisis

For Segal, the conditions of contemporary capitalism that have so badly distorted our ideas of what it is to be happy are also a driving force for this crisis of care.

“In thinking about the way in which a productivist, corporate capital ethos denies all the unpaid labour of what goes into their profits,” she goes on, “I think of care work and women and social reproduction. And there’s also the transhuman, of course.

“That’s why there’s so much recent interest in the bees and the dying out of species, because we’re actually dependent on the work of other non-human creatures, and trees and flowers and so on, and that’s never factored in at all.”

Factoring this dependency back into our understanding of ourselves is what Segal sets out to achieve in Radical Happiness. In doing so, she helps us to rediscover the joy we can draw from our ties to one another and our environment, even in the face of despair.

“I feel all my writing is about that,” she says. “How we affirm life, how we connect to others, how we keep hope alive. That’s really what all my books are about.”

This Author

Russell Warfield is a freelance journalist. Radical Happiness is published by Verso (2017). This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine which is out now. 

I’ve just published a book, called A Film-Philosophy of Ecology and Enlightenment. In this book, I discuss films such as The Road, Melancholia, Gravity and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But what’s it all about? What does the title of my book mean?

I’ll briefly explain, by way of an example. Which constitutes a kind of ‘trailer’ for the book…

Incendiary themes 

The final chapter of my book is about the biggest blockbuster of all time, Avatar. Consider the following important fact about Avatar: this was a film so potentially incendiary, eco-politically, that the authoritarian Chinese Government felt compelled quietly to ban it, for fear that it would ignite rural land-revolts. 

Or rather they tried to ban it in a way that didn’t look as if they were banning it. Only the 2D version of Avatar was banned in China, while the 3D version continued to be shown. The explanation for the withdrawal of the 2D version must have had a lot to do with the kind of people who only had access to 2D cinemas (i.e. poor and rural or provincial folk, the ones who might rebel over land-grabs and the like). The Chinese government was apparently quite confident that well-off urban people wouldn’t cause any trouble. 

That story alone tells us much of what we need to know about the potential power of films to change our world, a reason for giving them the serious attention that I do. 

What I claim in my book, about Avatar, is that Avatar ‘literalises’ what is metaphorically true of our world:

• The trees are a global network, sustaining life and consciousness 

• We can link our consciousness with other language-using creatures and with other non-language-using animals (with or without technology)

• Ey’wa is Gaia, Mother Earth

• The atmosphere, the air we breathe, is potentially becoming lethal for us

• The real wealth of the world lies not in shiny minerals, but in life. (Recall Ruskin’s great remark: “There is no wealth but life”.)

• The world is stunningly beautiful when we open our eyes to see it and attune ourselves to living harmoniously within it.
• The Tree of Souls is a metaphor for the fact that imagination and dreaming need not be private experiences. Creative forces can be harnessed and utilized collectively.

‘I see you’

Like many of the films considered in my book, Avatar ends by making a kind of call to the viewer. The call, in this case, is manifested powerfully as the main protagonist opens his eyes and gazes directly into yours, at the end of the film.

This call, I argue, is a call upon you to complete the film. How? The call is a call to replenish and restore the ecosystems of our fragile world, not merely of a fictional world, ‘Pandora’. The call is to save our world. The only world we have.

What we must first do is say (and mean) “I see you”, then we must wake up and appreciate the fact that we live in a paradise. As Jay Michaelson put it: “In the Na’Vi cosmology, what’s really happening is the [Ey]’Wa in me is connecting with the [Ey]’Wa in you. This is echoed in their greeting, “I see you”, a direct translation of the Sanskrit Namaste, which means the same thing.

“‘Avatar’ is also from the Sanskrit, though the film plays on the word’s two meanings, of an image used in a role-playing game, and a deity appearing on Earth). As the Na’Vi explain in the film, though, “I see you” doesn’t mean ordinary seeing – it, like Namaste, really means “the God in me sees the God in you.”” 

Transformative encounters

At one key point in the film, Norm – one of the film’s hero-human-scientists, and a fellow inhabitor of an avatarian-body – teaches our hero, Jake, what the true meaning of “I see you” is: “I see you, I see into you, I see who you really are.”

The story of the film is the story of Jake struggling with this. Early on in the film, for instance, he says “I sure hope this tree-hugging stuff isn’t on the final”. Eventually, after terrible setbacks, he learns to realise a deep sense of honouring himself and The Other.

The story of the film as a transformative ‘therapeutic’ encounter for we viewers is the story of us struggling with this and learning to realise it.

How do we get to the point of being able to do this, to truly say “I see you” to everyone and everything? Well, first, as I have already implied, by really seeing the film. By, as it were, saying “I see you” to Avatar…

The argument that I make in my book, with regard to this film and a dozen more, requires some courage. It requires courage for viewers to enter into it and accept, and make their own, and not to condescend or express contempt, as many critics of Avatar have done.

Willingness and determination 

I am taking a risk in saying this, and you are taking a risk if you believe it. It is ‘safer’ to remain on the barren heights of intellectual superiority, to mock the pretensions of a massive, commercial success.

It is particularly tempting to look down on a popular film, to ‘prove’ yourself superior to it – because then you are by implication ‘superior’ to the tens or hundreds of millions of people who love it.

I think that the risk of opening oneself to Avatar and to hope is well worth taking. The sterility and (in the end) systematic unsafety of the alternative – of trusting to business as usual, hoping only for techno-fixes, getting stuck in denial and distancing oneself from nature – is something we know is not the answer.

We know when we dare to feel the Earth beneath our feet, as we experience Jake doing when his avatar runs for the first time. 

Like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, and Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom trilogy, Lord of the Rings and Avatar teach and express a love of the physical, and of the biological. I predict that this theme will only become stronger in the sequels to Avatar that will appear in the next few years: a willingness to embrace our animal nature, and to love life, and a determination to enable future generations to do the same – this kind of willingness and determination manifest across the output of The Ecologist, from its beginnings to today.

Dare to dream

It is relatively easy for academics and critics to feel secure in the citadels of the cognitive mind. But it won’t stay easy for long.

It is time to come down into the green fields and forests and jungles of physicality and of spirit: to play, to imagine, to dare to dream. Collectively surely, we must take the risk of daring to hope. 

Daring to hope means that we may yet have the courage to save ourselves and our planet. To share a common will to prevent ecocide, and to fully achieve the glorious potential of life.

That, and nothing less, is what my book is about. How films and/as philosophy can enlighten us. And, maybe, help us to live eco-logically again before it’s too late.

 This Author 

Rupert Read is a reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia.

The Environment Agency and Natural England have put Nutrient Management Plans (NMPs) in place in England’s sensitive catchments – including protected Natura 2000 sites

Producing NMPs for Natura 2000 sites helps to provide evidence for Habitats Regulations Assessments which might be required in relation to development plans and reviews of discharge consents. NMP’s also provide evidence that underpins the strategy to achieve the targets arising from the Habitats Directive, Birds Directive and Water Framework Directive.

An Improvement Programme for Natura 2000 sites (IPENS) has been developed by Natural England which includes a Site Improvement Plan (SIP) for each Natura 2000 site. Eight of these site improvement plans include an NMP. These provide a mechanism for tackling water pollution where excessive phosphorus and or nitrogen loading requires a combined approach that addresses point discharges and diffuse sources. 

Special conservation

The River Avon Special Area of Conservation (SAC) is a Natura 2000 site with an NMP, where phosphorus is preventing favourable conservation status being achieved across the catchment. 

The River Wye SAC has reaches where the levels of phosphate exceed the target level in the conservation objectives. Other examples of sites with an NMP include the River Clun and River Mease SACs and Poole Harbour Special Protection Area (SPA).

The River Mease SAC’s excessive levels of phosphate are preventing the achievement of favourable condition, and at Poole Harbour SPA, increasing nitrogen levels from sewage and agriculture are contributing to the growth of algal mats in the harbour,restricting food for wading birds and smothering estuarine habitats. 

Meanwhile, the River Clun is designated as a SAC for freshwater pearl mussel. Since 1995, surveys have shown that the population of freshwater pearl mussel is non-functioning due to pollution issues from phosphorus, nitrogen and sediment. 

Pollution control

Pollution control for the above NMPs includes measures for both point sources and diffuse sources. 

For diffuse sources, there are various measures such as integrated soil, water and nutrient management plans for farms; encouraging the use of winter storage reservoirs within the horticultural sector; rectifying sewer misconnections and reverting to semi natural vegetation.

At point sources, examples of measures include upgrading sewage treatment works to strip out nutrients; reducing phosphorus emissions from fish farms and cress farms; preventing infiltration to the sewer network; reducing discharges from Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) and examining the potential to retrofit Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS).

New development

An NMP is a potential barrier to the construction of housing and other infrastructure in these catchments, particularly where the development could increase nutrient loads in sewage. 

Given the urgent need for new housing in the UK, this is a real concern. However, if the resulting nutrients can be removed at the sewage treatment works or be offset through measures to reduce diffuse pollution, developments can still proceed. 

Potential restrictions vary. For example, at the River Mease, new development can only take place if it contributes to the Developer Contribution Scheme so as to be phosphate neutral. Developer Contribution Scheme contributions from residential development coming forward in the first development window are calculated by the size of the dwelling and how sustainable it is. 

At Poole Harbour, new development can only take place if it mitigates 25 percent of the additional nitrogen it produces (Wessex Water is expected to remove the other 75 percent at sewage treatment works). 

A supplementary planning document (SPD) lays out the process for councils to secure mitigation from Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) and Section 106 agreements.

Increased clarity 

The SPD provides examples of nitrate loads for different development types and mitigation options. The developer has up to four choices for the Section 106 agreement, including to provide alternative technologies to remove the remaining nitrogen, increase the size of Suitable Alternative Natural Greenspaces (SANGs) on agricultural land, agree with the council a change to the management of agricultural land in the wider landholding in perpetuity, and/or purchase agricultural land elsewhere within the catchment and use it for mitigation.

The River Avon NMP originally allowed development within the existing headroom of sewage treatment works. However, the Environment Agency and Natural England subsequently advised that development must be phosphate neutral as targets in the NMP were unlikely to be met by 2021. 

Post 2025, it is assumed that upgraded sewage treatment works will remove additional phosphorus. A joint Memorandum of Understanding provides for interim mitigation which will be funded primarily through CIL paid by developers, 

Specific schemes to facilitate development in a controlled manner, such as those for the River Mease, the River Avon and Poole Harbour, are important because they provide clarity to developers on what measures they need to adopt to comply with the NMP.

However, experience suggests that there are still areas of uncertainty for developers, for example around the level of reliance that can be placed on water companies to upgrade sewage treatment works beyond the current Asset Management Plan (AMP) and on the level of nutrients that can be assumed to be removed by different offsetting measures. 

Increased clarity on these issues is required so that the urgent need for new housing can be met, while fully protecting these important aquatic habitats. 

This Author 

Dr Steve Mustow is director and head of environmental planning at WYG.

Malaysian firm Top Glove, the world’s largest glovemaker, has vowed to clean up its labour supply chain and workplace practices after cases were uncovered of migrants toiling for long hours to pay off huge debts. 

The firm, a major supplier of medical and rubber gloves to 195 countries including Britain and the United States, employs more than 11,000 migrant workers, from countries like Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and India. 

At some of its factories outside the Malaysian capital, workers told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that they often work long hours to earn overtime pay, and in some cases exceed the limit of overtime hours stipulated under local labour laws. 

Unethical recruitment

Workers interviewed said they hoped to quickly repay loans of at least 5,000 Malaysian ringgit ($1,200) they took out to pay recruitment agents in their home countries. They said others were charged up to 20,000 Malaysian ringgit. 

Top Glove is not alone in hiring migrants who pay agents to secure a job. The practice is common across all Malaysian sectors which hire workers from overseas. 

Top Glove said it was not aware of its labour suppliers charging exorbitant fees to migrant workers but vowed to investigate and severe ties with unethical recruitment agents. 

Lee Kim Meow, the company’s managing director, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation: “We will want to stop dealing with such suppliers if we know they are very unscrupulous. It’s our duty to do that, we will never condone it.

“We need workers, no doubt, but we will not stoop so low to support people who exploit workers.” He was speaking in an interview at the company’s office in Klang, an industrial area outside the capital Kuala Lumpur.

Working overtime 

High recruitment fees are a common plight faced by the nearly two million registered migrant workers in Malaysia, which relies heavily on foreign labour in industries from plantations and construction to manufacturing. 

The United Nations’ International Labour Organization has said these debts could trap workers in bondage, and businesses have come under pressure in recent years to clean up their labour supply chains. 

Migrant workers at Top Glove said they were paid at least 1,000 Malaysian ringgit a month, Malaysia’s minimum wage, and given access to their passport under a locker system that had been advocated by local rights groups. 

But they work a lot of overtime to earn enough to pay off their debts. Workers at the factory clock 90 to 120 hours of overtime work a month, according to documents seen by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

Under Malaysian laws, workers should be given a rest day each week and work not more than 104 hours of overtime a month. 

Huge loans

A Nepali, who declined to use his name out of fear for his job, said: “If I don’t work these extra hours, how could I possibly earn enough?” 

He borrowed a $1,100 loan from a moneylender with a three percent interest rate every month to pay his agent in Nepal. 

Top Glove said it has rolled out a “shift pattern change” since March across its 40 factories to ensure workers get adequate rest. 

Top Glove’s deputy human resources head Loke Kean Mun said: “Definitely this is an area where we will have to pay attention,” and added that the measures are in place to “overcome all this excessive overtime. 

“This is where we definitely have to enforce and tighten up (across all factories).” 

Glove capital

Malaysia has become the world’s glove capital, and produces three out of every five pairs used in the world, according to the Malaysian Rubber Glove Manufacturers Association. 

Top Glove, which produces 60.5 billion gloves each year, is the world’s leading glove manufacturer followed by other Malaysia-based firms like Hartalega, Kossan and Supermax. 

Malaysia’s new government, which came to power in May on promises to reform – ousting a long-ruling, corruption-mired coalition – has vowed to improve conditions for migrant workers. 

Without referring to any specific firms, Human Resources Minister M. Kulasegaran told the Thomson Reuters Foundation this week that major companies in the country must take the lead to ensure there are no labour abuses. 

Kulasegaran, a veteran lawyer who grew up on a rubber estate and has championed worker’s rights prior to his appointment, said: “The big companies must take it upon themselves to be more strict in enforcing these rules. We will prosecute if there are any wrongdoings.”

This Author 

Beh Lih Yi is is a reporter at the Thomson Reuters Foundation focussing on slavery, human trafficking, gender equality & environment in Asia.@behlihyi. 

This article was first published by Thomson Reuters.

This is the story of Mark Constantine, the founder of Lush, a company committed to cruelty-free cosmetics.

It is a remarkable biography of a man who grew up without a father, failed in school exams, did not go to university, and as a young man was homeless and penniless. All these difficulties proved to be a blessing in disguise, and made him strong.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now!

The turning point came when Constantine met Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop. They were kindred spirits and hit it off immediately. They collaborated in their businesses and shared their passion to produce perfumes and cosmetics that embodied social and environmental values.

Political issues 

After The Body Shop was sold and Roddick met her premature death, Constantine established his own business, Lush, in a similar spirit.

It could almost be said that in many ways Lush is the heir to The Body Shop. All Lush products are 100 percent vegetarian and largely unpackaged. Minimum waste and maximum recycling are the principles and practices Constantine has established at Lush.

Moreover, the campaigning zeal of Lush shows that a business can also be a champion of good causes.

In recent times, we have seen Lush’s campaign to highlight sexual abuse by undercover police officers. Lush produced a poster depicting a man as half police officer and half civilian spy; the caption read “PAID TO LIE #SPYCOPS”. This caused much controversy, but it showed that a business has the ability to stand up for social integrity and take direct action.

Lush has run a number of other campaigns to create awareness about social, environmental and political issues.

Moving story 

In addition to being a perfume dealer and a social activist, Constantine is a keen birdwatcher. His books and CDs of bird life and birdsong are a heartfelt celebration of Nature.

He has devoted a great deal of time, money and love to creating the Birds of Poole Harbour website, which has become a wonderful source of information and inspiration for people who are interested in the rich life of birds in one of England’s most beautiful locations.

Dear John was written in the context of Constantine’s not knowing where his father, John, was, or whether he was dead or alive. The author, Jeff Osment, a friend of Mark’s from childhood, took it upon himself to search for John.

Thanks to Osment, there was an emotional reunion of father and son after 58 years of separation; John Constantine had migrated to a town called Pelindaba, in South Africa.

This is a moving story told in a sympathetic and mostly non-judgemental manner. Mark Constantine’s story shows that success can come from struggle and that through persistence and resilience you can even reconnect with your lost father.

This Author

Satish Kumar is editor emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. His autobiography, No Destination, is published by Green Books. Dear John: The Road To Pelindaba: The Unexpected Life Story of Mark Constantine OBE Co-Founder of Lush is available from all good bookstores.

The latest edition of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine is out now.