Mathiatis, a Cypriot village nestled in the foothills of the Troodos mountain range, is entangled in a fierce fight for identity, community and nature.

For the past year it is threatened, as Hellenic Copper Mines (HCM) seeks to reopen an ancient mine to extract gold. The reopening of the mine would have major environmental, cultural and health impacts.

Citizen groups such as the Historical and Environmental Protection Group of Mathiatis are fighting back. They have written letters, organised demonstrations and have been in and out of parliament to plead their case. They have organised tours of the area with geologists and archaeologists to help local people understand what is at stake.

Bird species

At first, the community convinced the Department of Antiquities that risk to archaeological evidence was too large. But now they face a second challenge as HCM has reapplied for a new license.

The ancient South Mathiatis site was first used as a copper mine in 600 BC. Between 1935 and 1945, when the country was under British occupation, the Cyprus Mines Corporation (CMC) used the military backing by the occupiers to turn it into a gold mine.

The British Colonial period resulted in horrific conditions and many deaths for Cypriot workers. While the occupation ended a lifetime ago, its legacy still exists today.

The laws still writes that companies don’t need to rehabilitate the environment around the mine. The island, scarred by the conflict of 1974, is divided. This leaves Cyprus open to exploitation by private companies. Already twenty-five potential mining sites have been identified around the island.

The wildlife that over time has had the chance to reestablish would be disrupted. The area around the mine is forested by pine trees that house rare bird species such as the Hoopoe.

Ochre landscape

In the ancient galleries, three species of endangered bats are nested. They are protected by European law. If trucks would start transporting ore from Mathiatis to the gold processing plant in Skouriotissa, both human and animal life would be affected.

Air pollution caused by large scale excavation work would have a huge impact on the health of the local population. The region already suffers from severe dust clouds.

Further pollution would affect the cultivation of the land in this largely pastoral area. The area faces increasing desertification and the original proposal of HCM to cut 2,000 trees was therefore alarming.

The environmental and health damages from the reopening of the mine are obvious. But there are other, less quantifiable but equally important consequences. In this region, the culture of the people is closely tied to the landscape.

Only 2km from the village, the South Mathiatis Mine or “Strongylos Mine” appears as an open pit in the vibrant orange, umber and ochre landscape.

Promises of jobs

However, it is an area full of archaeologically significant sites with evidence of ancient mining dating back to 600 BC. It is a proposed site in the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Monuments in the category of Natural and Cultural Landscape.

Geologically, the 90-million-year-old fragment of oceanic crust draws visitors and scientists from all over the world. Archaeologically rare artefacts unique to the eastern Mediterranean were discovered and the community of Mathiatis is listed among the first on travellers’ maps for importance linked to mining activity.

“Slag”- evidence of ancient mining found around the open cast Mathiatis mine. Photo: Etienne Montel

The community’s combat has been marked by both victories and setbacks. Currently, the new proposal of HCM seeks to extract gold from the surrounding waste dumps from previous mining activity.

The company argues that this will clean up the area, doing the government and the environment a favor.

Members of the community see past the company’s arguments and their promises of jobs, prosperity and a new football field. Some, like Thea Christoforou, highlighted that the community would get an insignificant amount of the profits.

Ecological wellbeing

There’s a law that states that the government would only gain one percent of the company’s profits. From this the community gets only 0.4 percent.

But there’s more to this than money. The community doesn’t only oppose the mine, they also try to redefine and reclaim the vision of development co-opted by Hellenic Copper Mines and the government.

Instead of extraction and destruction of the local ecosystem in pursuit of profit for the few, they demand the sharing and caring of their commons.

Evi Charalambous, a key member of the local resistance, emphasizes this could also translate into educational and eco-tourism that seeks to combine the nature and heritage of the area.

Female activists

The groups represent two of the many citizens led initiatives on the Island that challenge the government’s view of “development” and demand that the community and ecological wellbeing come first.

They are part of a struggle against a wider problem in Cyprus where neoliberal policies sell off coastal areas and destruct protected areas.

As Myrto Skouroupathi from Young Friends of the Earth Cyprus said: “By extending solidarity to other affected communities, those in Mathiatis are helping to turn the tide as a wave of grassroots activism sweeps Cyprus”.

It is no coincidence that Myrto, Evi and Thea are all women. It is often women who start the resistance in case of an attack that threatens the community. This is also the case in Cyprus, where strong female activists led the way in the struggle for environmental justice.

This Author

V’cenza Cirefice is an activist with Young Friends of the Earth Ireland and Young Friends of the Earth Cyprus who has a special interest in issues gender and environmental justice. The EnvJustice research project studies and contributes to the global environmental justice movement.

Much has been made of the benefits of engaging with and learning in the outdoors.  The evidence for the positive impacts both to education and child development is compelling and the need in our young people is, sadly, growing. 

One of my most vivid memories from primary school is sitting under a horse chestnut tree in the heat of summer, its vast canopy casting a welcome shade over a class of excited six year olds, sorting leaves into piles. That memory is now some 45 years old and yet it has stayed with me above all the clamour and noise of my youth. 

These memories can be powerful for us all, imprinting on our formative years and creating a sense of amazement, belonging even.  I often wonder whether those classes in the outdoors were the beginning of my own affinity with the natural world.  

Active childhood

It breaks my heart to read that one in ten young people has a mental health problem, and that 28 percent of our young people are overweight or obese. 

Childhood should be a time of carefree enjoyment, when our children should be active and bursting with energy.  It seems odd then that despite our understanding of these issues and the obvious benefits of outdoor learning, it is still not mainstream in our schools.

Trees are thankfully not just memories for me but part of my work as an Environmentalist and Chief Executive of the National Forest Company. Here, we decided to see how many of the 88 primary schools in the 200 square miles of forest (which spans parts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire in the UK) are involved in regular outdoor learning – that is, learning in a natural setting at least once a month.  

What we found was that even in these 200 square miles of the Midlands where the natural environment is high up the agenda, less than a fifth of our primary schools met the standard and, not surprisingly, those that did were ones with extensive grounds, greater resources or their own transport.  

This situation seems to be mirrored across the whole country, where there are pockets of excellent work going on but, overall, provision is very patchy.  

School improvement

When you dig down into the reasons we don’t mainstream outdoor learning, it gets more complicated.  Some will say that the National Curriculum doesn’t really prioritise outdoor learning or that it is not a prerequisite for an outstanding Ofsted rating, others that it is too expensive to take children off-site or that there simply isn’t time in the day.  

Of course, all of these are true to some extent, but are they really the barriers holding us back?  I can’t help feeling that the problem is actually more systemic – we don’t do it simply because we haven’t done it, not because it isn’t possible.  What we have failed to do is to embed outdoor learning in the fabric of teaching within schools.

I would argue that as environmentalists, we have focused too much on delivering the teaching and not enough on really enabling the schools to do it themselves.

We asked ourselves in the National Forest what would happen if we helped build capacity within our primary schools by training the teachers to lead the sessions, creating outdoor learning areas in the schools or in woodlands within walking distance, and bringing outdoor learning into school improvement plans.

This evolved into a simple Five Point Plan designed to target funds to what we felt would make outdoor learning sustainable.  It’s so simple that we think every school in the country could adopt it – with a little support, guidance and modest funding.  No waiting for changes to the National Curriculum, no worries about travelling off-site, and no reliance on having to find transport.  

Future environmentalists

The Plan is being launched by the new Forestry Minister, David Rutley MP, and the former Education Secretary, the Rt Hon Nicky Morgan MP in the House of Commons on 23 October 2018.            

So, the challenge is on, and so far the Plan is working.  We’ve doubled the number of schools with regular provision – from less than 20 percent  to more than 40 percent – with others taking on more frequent outdoor learning activity.  

Next year we think we’ll reach 50 percent of schools, and from there to 100 percent within five years.  That will be pretty amazing – that every school child in the National Forest will grow up experiencing regular outdoor learning.  

And who knows what difference this will make?  We hope it will be a catalyst to create a generation that understands and cares; for schools to want to take children off-site or on residential stays; for more bushcraft and family activities out of school; for better teacher training with our local universities; for governors and school leaders to champion the benefits; and ultimately a catalyst for children to grow up healthier and happier. 

If we succeed, I’m convinced we will be creating the environmentalists of the future and, no doubt, making more memories that will last a lifetime.  

Further details and the National Forest Five Point Plan can be found here.

This Author

John Everitt is a British environmentalist who has spent more than 25 years in nature conservation. He is the chief executive of the National Forest Company, responsible for coordinating the creation and management of the 200 square mile National Forest in the Midlands, UK. Stay updated by following @NatForestCo on Twitter. 

The first accelerator programme of its kind finding and commercialising the best new circular economy start-up business innovations has been launched, according to an announcement from the London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB).

The accelerator, run by LWARB’s Advance London programme, is focussed for this first accelerator is the built environment sector and is calling for applications from interested entrepreneurs.

Advance London is working with partners The Carbon Trust and Whole Earth Futures to deliver the accelerator, which will offer six months of free intensive support for up to 10 start-ups. Each start-up will already have a working prototype and be ready to test their technologies in the market.

Scaling-up innovations

As part of the support package, desk space will be provided in LWARB’s new offices, together with bespoke mentoring and access to their extensive partner network. The aim is to enable the rapid scaling up of innovations.

This first cohort of start-ups will be focused on circular economy within the construction industry, developing new technologies and business models that can advance concepts such as: modularisation; design for disassembly and re-use; technology to prolong asset life; alternative materials and material re-use; turning products into services; and the creation of data platforms. 

Start-up businesses will be selected on their potential to scale up and contribute to London’s low carbon, circular economy.

This marks another step in the Advance London programme strategy of supporting the best circular economy SMEs in London and builds on LWARB’s growing expertise and partner network. The accelerator will also leverage LWARB and London’s existing strengths in the technology, finance, academic and start-up sectors.

Applications will open next week commencing 22nd October, and interested start-ups are encouraged to get in contact now through the Advance London website. 

Supporting entrepreneurs 

Wayne Hubbard, Chief Executive at London Waste and Recycling Board (LWARB), announced the accelerator at the P4G Summit in Copenhagen today. He said: “If cities are the engine rooms of the circular economy, start-ups are the spark.

“Start-up businesses are making an essential contribution to London’s transition to become a circular city, and this accelerator is part of LWARB’s strategy to provide support and finance to circular economy businesses from start-up to maturity.

“The recent IPCC report has shown us the need for urgent action – this support programme forms a part of our response.”

Supporting innovation within the low carbon economy and developing the start-up ecosystem are core pillars of the Mayor of London’s Environment Strategy and Economic Development Strategy. 

A dedicated circular economy accelerator will help new entrepreneurs overcome some of the barriers to establishing products and services within their market, and help make London’s economy more sustainable.

Vital role

Shirley Rodrigues, the deputy mayor for environment and energy, said: “The Mayor is working hard to make London a world leader in efforts to promote a circular economy, which could provide London with net benefits of at least £7 billion every year and 40,000 new jobs by 2036.

“The International Panel on Climate Change is clear: action on climate change cannot wait and circular economy businesses of all sizes and sectors have a vital role to play.

“This accelerator is a great opportunity to nurture London’s start-up businesses and help our low carbon economy flourish.”

This Author

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from London Waste and Recycling Board.

The free market International Policy Network (IPN) was launched amid much fanfare in 2001 with Julian Morris and Roger Bate at the helm. Almost immediately John Blundell, the director of the Institute of Economic Affairs and an IPN board member, closed down the Environment Unit.

The war against climate science was about to embark on a new journey, with a purpose built think tank ready to take to the front line. The IPN would try and convince the world that free market economics – and climate denial – were in the interests of the poorest people and the most impoverished countries.

The IPN tried at first to keep its funding from ExxonMobil and British American Tobacco secret, fearing journalists would not take them seriously if the vested interests of their financial backers were known. And it was only a few years before Morris and Bate apparently fell out – with Bate being the first of the three men to leave for the United States.

Morris and Bate were long-term friends and started a company together, and were known to most people in the sceptic community as a brilliant double act. 

Intense and Obsessive

Professor James Tooley, a member of the IEA advisory council, worked closely with the two men at the IEA. He said: “Roger was definitely the boss at the time Julian took over.

“Roger came across as the most sophisticated, Julian was more sort of the person who pushed, who got things going, more solid – cerebral I think the word is.”

Roger Scruton, the popular philosopher once paid as a consultant to tobacco, describes his friend, Bate, as “a more serious intellectual”, “intense” and “obsessive”.

Bate, however, retained very close ties with climate denier Fred Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) in the US – funded by Philip Morris, Dow Chemicals and ExxonMobil – and his work at the environment unit appears to have been less than full time.

He described himself in 2000 as a fellow in International Policy at the CEI in Washington. Soon after, colleagues began to suspect that the close friendship between Bate and Morris was under strain.

Internal dispute

Dr Pennington, an academic advisor to the early environment unit, told me that there had been an “internal dispute” and the two men had “fallen out with each other”.

He added: “It just was dysfunctional… Roger was concerned about Julian Morris’s partner. They had different approaches, they just fell out like people in offices do.”

The relationships among the think tank staff were certainly intimate, which would have increased the potential for personal disputes.

Bate was, around this time, registered as living in Cambridge with his lover, Lorraine Mooney, the company secretary at his charity, the European Science and Environment Forum.

Workplace gossip

But, whispered gossip began to circulate around the office that Bate was concerned about the quality of work delivered by Morris’s wife and IPN employee, Kendra Okonski.

The accounts for the IPN show that, in 2005, the IPN was paying Okonski £28,000 and that she claimed £4,448 in expenses. Another member of the IPN staff said: “This is rumour… but Bate had disagreements with Julian over Kendra.”

Then, in 2003, the dispute appears to have reached an impasse as Bate resigned as a director of the IPN and moved to the United States.

The following year, he was earning $100,000 a year for a 30-hour week as chairman of Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), which was receiving $30,000 from ExxonMobil for “climate change outreach”.

Conflicts of interest

He was also hired as a fellow by the American Enterprise Institute, which enjoyed funding from Koch, Exxon and major tobacco companies, although he drifted away from the subject of climate change.

Julian Morris told me: “As usual, you get most of your facts wrong and make claims based on alleged hearsay that strike me as implausible.

“IPN was founded in 2001 with Roger and I as co-directors and John Blundell, Linda Whetstone and Mike Fisher as board members. As I recall, the IEA terminated the environment and technology programme when I moved over to IPN because the programme no longer had a director, not the other way round. Roger and I remained research fellows at the IEA for a while after that.

“Salaries at International Policy Network were determined by the organization’s board, not by me. I was not on the board in 2005. Kendra’s expenses were approved by the chairman, Linda Whetstone. We were very diligent to avoid such conflicts of interest.”

This Author

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

The debate about Brexit grinds on. Yet, when I took part in LBC’s Cross Question last week, the presenter Iain Dale bemoaned the lack of a public question on Brexit, despite the obvious potential in the panel for fireworks on the subject.

While there’s plenty of exhaustion around this topic, what’s also clear is that public knowledge about some of the key issues has grown enormously: the Northern Ireland border, single market versus customs union versus WTO rules, the risk to which we are putting UK citizens settled in the rest of Europe (and other EU states’ citizens here).

As there’s still much that’s little or unknown, I welcomed a request from the Renewable Energy Association to speak at UK Construction Week  on the potential impacts of Brexit on our future energy supplies.

Energy market

This all begins with an acronym (and I promise I’m only going to use one) – IEM: the Internal Energy Market. This body sets up the simplest possible mechanisms for energy to be exchanged across the Continent. With six percent (set to rise to 22 percent) of our electricity already coming from interconnectors across the Channel, the IEM is important.

Cooperation is a way in which we can balance our electricity supply by dealing with variability in demand in supply, something that will be increasingly important in future.

If we leave the IEM it doesn’t mean we can’t continue to get that power or balancing, but it will certainly be more complicated and more expensive – estimates range from £100m to £500m a year.

The other key issue is one that ties in with many others – energy efficiency and the essential growth of renewable energy sources to tackle the pressing issue of climate change.

Resource efficiency 

There’s been a lot of talk about the risk of chlorinated chicken and hormone-laced beef from the US, but less focus on the importance of maintaining standards for energy and resource efficiency on everything from vacuum cleaners to housing.

If our manufacturers want to maintain European markets, they’ll have to meet those standards, but imports won’t necessarily have to. That could mean more costs for consumers, more climate damage, and tougher times for our businesses.

These are technical issues, but they feed into an important point: a lot of the debate on Brexit has focused on the costs of leaving. But it is also important that we focus on the benefits of remaining – especially with fast-growing prospects of a People’s Vote in the coming months.

We saw how disastrous a negative campaign proved in 2016. What we need now is something different.

And if we look at the IEM and the energy standards we now enjoy as part of our membership of the EU, here’s part of the positive case for remaining in the EU.

Environmental standards

As with police and intelligence cooperation, even regulation of nuclear facilities and medicines, there can be few Leavers ideologically wedded to going it alone when the benefits of cooperation are so obvious and clear.

When we work together to maintain and improve standards, when we help each other out when we need it, cooperatively, with the minimum of borders and walls between us, we all benefit.

That’s true on food and environmental standards – people’s campaigns won a ban on fisheries discards and blocked the disastrous bee-killing neonicotinoids – and it is clearly true on energy supplies.

Going it alone now is a nonsensical move, in terms of costs, in terms of security and resilience, in terms of standing up against the power of multinational companies.

Information is power is a very old slogan – and it is important British people have this information as we struggle to find a way forward from where we are now. 

At the very least, we must educate ourselves and others about the basic frame of the IEM; know where the energy you need can come from, and how we can share ours with our neighbours, to the mutual benefit of all. That’s what a union can achieve.

This Author 

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

British agriculture is getting a new settlement for the first time in three generations. The Agriculture Bill is going through parliament now and promises “public money for public goods”.

We at the Vegan Society were pleased with this announcement: this way, farmers will be rewarded for benefiting the wider world. But when we looked at the Bill, we found no detail, no promises and no guarantees.

At present, farmers are supported financially according to how much land they own. The government has called that system “arbitrary”.

Public goods

One expects, then, that the move to public money for public goods would be proportional: the more public goods, the more money.

It seems not. Under the current proposals, Farmer A may have the best farm ever for the environment and get almost nothing, while a highly pollutive, industrial Farmer B could receive lots of subsidies to continue to pollute.

There is no detail on how ministers should distribute funds in response to public goods. A list of public goods is given, but not actually tied to the funds. Moreover, funds can be given not only for providing public goods but also for “starting … agricultural activity”, with no qualifications that this should be beneficial at all.

There is a risk that the spirit of the public goods approach may have left the bill before its realisation.

If the principle of the bill really were public money for public goods, it would encourage a large shift away from animal agriculture and towards environmentally friendly, plant-based agriculture. 

Deep inefficiencies

Typically, farming animals is much worse for the environment and climate than growing crops. Beans, pulses, and legumes have benefits for conserving water, freeing up land, improving soil quality, and protecting biodiversity. Not only this – they have the power to mitigate climate change.

In contrast, UN figures indicate that globally, animal agriculture has a greater contribution to greenhouse gas emissions than all modes of transport combined: every car, plane, truck, ship, lorry, and so on.

That’s a surprising figure. It becomes less so when we observe that farming animals can produce large amounts of methane, require the production of feed, and involve deep inefficiencies.

After all, the overwhelming majority of the calories fed to animals is expended in keeping the animal alive, conscious, moving, and functioning. Only around 12 calories out of 100 are thought to be retained in the production of meat, dairy, and eggs. This results in more emissions, and more missed opportunities to feed our burgeoning population.

Growing crops for human consumption is kinder on the climate. If going vegan can reduce one’s food-related greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, then a shift towards a plant-based agricultural system would do a world of good for the planet.

Shifting subsidies 

Growing crops for human consumption is not only greener and cleaner. It is also conducive to our self-sufficiency.

Plant-based agriculture uses only half the land required for producing animal products, evidence suggests. So if we eat more plant-based food, our land can be used to grow more food, and there is greater potential for the UK to cut reliance on imports and grow more of what it eats.

This would carry some environmental benefit in itself, reducing food miles. But it also highlights how the vegan movement can support farmers at home. We should remember that vegans also support farmers, and typically, they strive to protect the environment on which farming so depends.

The Vegan Society’s campaign Grow Green calls for subsidies to be shifted to encourage the plant protein industry. Crops such as beans, pulses, and legumes are healthy, sustainable, affordable, and ethical. They are wonder crops from a policy point of view. We used to grow much more of them, and some are suitable for growing across the UK.

Now that the Bill is at committee stage, we hope that pragmatic MPs will see the need for a more plant-based system. For now is the time for change. Two days before the Bill’s second reading, the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) handed the world just twelve years to deal with our climate crisis. They called for agriculture to change, citing the need for “rapid and far-reaching” changes in land use.

Ministers must listen to this. And they must hand farmers the right tools to protect our climate, if they are to secure the bright future that they have promised.

This Author

William Gildea is a campaigns and policy officer at The Vegan Society, an educational charity.

A sweltering summer descended upon Southern Florida in 2018, bringing with it a toxic green plague – yet again. 

Expansive algae blooms have become a bi-annual occurrence in recent times marring both of Florida’s once pristine coasts, but there has never been a lost summer like 2018. It is now October and “red tide” still lingers on Florida’s West Coast, while simultaneously closing beaches on the East Coast. 

Florida’s ecosystems have been largely destroyed over the last hundred years due to haphazard development of the state, which disregarded (and continues to disregard) potential repercussions.

River of grass

In the twenty-first century, Floridians are left to attempt to reconnect and reanimate what was once congruous and alive through paradoxically managerial means similar to those employed by our forebearers. If we fail in this restorative endeavour, a slow but certain death awaits.

Florida’s natural topography was seen by industrial-age settlers as something that needed “improvement” by “reclaiming land from the mucky jaws of Florida’s natural landscape. 

At the turn of the 20th Century, Florida — from Lake Okeechobee south — was largely one contiguous plain of sawgrass, forest, rivers and marshy wetlands. When Henry Morrison Flagler’s railroad and droves of settlers arrived, it was determined by Flagler, Julia Tuttle, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and other pioneering developers, that the land had to be made suitable to sustain modern industrial civilization. 

Unfortunately, this process entailed the diversion of the natural flow of water via dikes, dams and canals. In the center of the state from Lake Okeechobee south, the building of canals to drain water allowed agricultural fields to be created at the expense of the once great and continuous “river of grass.”

With obstinance, humans have demonstrated the folly of trying to “manage” an intricate ecosystem which we still do not fully understand. 

As a result, the drainage system created by the Army Corps of Engineers in the early 20th century, continues to wreak havoc on Florida in the present. 

Industrial interventions

This management system entailed and has led to the straightening of the Kissimmee River to make lands suitable for raising cattle, and has eliminated the natural filtration systems that the river once had; 

The building of the Herbert Hoover Dike after the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928has cut off the natural flow of water from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades. The diking, damming and diversion of Florida’s natural watersheds by way of artificial canals designed to provide water to cities has further inhibited the natural flow of water from north to south, preventing it from replenishing the Everglades. 

Added to this, the construction of the Okeechobee Waterway was intended to artificially control lake water levels during the rainy season, but it pummels brackish coastal estuaries with billions of gallons of polluted freshwater during discharge events.

The alteration of Florida’s historical hydrology has also led to a number of indirect consequences. The lack of clean fresh water flowing into the Everglades has resulted in a lack of fresh water flow to Florida Bay, inciting hypersaline conditions which cause sea grass die offs in the bay.

The Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers were once expansive fresh water rivers, but are now polluted brackish waterways due to Lake Okeechobee discharges. 

Unforeseen consequences 

The nutrient-loaded waters of these two rivers fuel virulent algae blooms, which then destroy oyster beds, sea grass plains and coral reefs on the East coast, while fueling red tides on the West coast.

The water from Lake Okeechobee is not only freshwater entering a salt water environment, but it is also laced with toxic levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, heavy metals, blue-green algae and bacteria from agricultural and industrial operations. 

Over the years numerous actions have been taken to restore Florida’s natural river of grass to its former glory, the first of which was the establishment of Everglades National Park in 1947, to preserve the southern quarter of the original Everglades ecosystem. 

Subsequent legislation, including the Clean Water Act, has attempted to alleviate environmental issues facing the Everglades ecosystem by implementing certain water quality standards designed to reduce environmental degradation, though agricultural polluters have been able to circumvent the Clean Water Act requirements. 

State legislation of the 80s and 90s helped to pave the way for the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Program(CERP), passed by the United States Congress in 2000. CERP, the largest environmental restoration project in the history of the United States, is estimated to cost $10.5 billion and take upwards of thirty-five years to complete. 

Potential solutions 

The essence of CERP is to restore as much of the historical hydrology as is possible in urbanized South Florida, remedying the dammed system of canals and pumps that exists today. 

To this end, CERP includes plans to build canals to redirect water from central and eastern Florida directly into Everglades National Park and Florida Bay. 

While CERP has made some progress, it has had trouble gaining traction due to its cost, scale and intervention by special interest groups, leading to additional legislation.

Faced with an algal pestilence nearly every year, Florida voters approved a Land Acquisition Fund in 2014 designed to allow the state of Florida to purchase land south of the lake in order to store, treat and release water south into the Everglades, rather than to the East and West coasts respectively. 

At the earliest, the Everglades Agricultural Area (EAA) reservoir — required to treat and store water before sending it south into the Everglades —will not be completed until 2021. While the seasonal discharges from Lake Okeechobee continue to ravish Florida’s coasts, no end is in sight as of yet.

Big sugar

While farming is a noble and timeless tradition, it is best not to confuse the yeoman farmer and provider of nourishment with large-scale industrial operations like U.S. Sugar and Florida Crystals. 

Lest we forget that these sugar companies pollute with blatant disregard for the natural world and receive huge subsidies and benefit greatly from tariffs placed on imported sugar. Let us also remember that these companies do not produce something of sustenance that is necessary for life, but rather a substance that takes away from life and has been linked to every American ailment, including obesity, diabetes, stroke, heart disease and more. 

But we must refrain from solely placing the blame for our predicament on these two sugar companies — though they do bear a brunt of it. Similar environmental atrocities are occurring in the St. Lucie Waterway region, where theunabated and largely unregulated use of sewage sludge as fertilizer near the banks of the canal continues to fertilise a river stricken by regular algae blooms.

In the St. Lucie Waterway region — spanning the gamut from Port Mayaca in the West, to Stuart in the east — the unabated and largely unregulated use of sewage sludge as fertilizer near the banks of the canal, continues to fertilize the very river stricken by what are almost annual algae blooms. 

It is our job as citizens to use careful discernment to separate wheat from chaff and myth from reality. 

Lessons learned 

While CERP must be expedited to send water south to quench the parched Everglades and begin the restoration of Florida’s coastal estuaries, we should similarly be leery of governmental overreach, lest we may lose access to the lands some of us are fighting so dearly to protect.

Florida will never again be a prolific virgin wilderness, though it seems reasonable to assert it may be restored to reflect its former greatness and biotic productivity. 

Humankind should not seek to dominate, control, or “manage” nature, for as a whole we do not possess the knowledge or virtue necessary to successfully do so. Rather, humankind and nature should coexist as one: the former ceasing to abate the latter. 

Nonetheless, we in the twenty-first century face a conundrum where we must allay the cavalier actions of our ancestors, who sought to drain the Great Swamp all those years ago.

Moving forward 

As we move forward, let us always remember that it is easier to do something than to fix the unintended repercussions afterwards. If our ancestors would have applied the aforementioned maxim, we would not be in the predicament we are in today. 

We have disrupted Florida’s natural rhythms and processes to such an extent that nature no longer regulates itself and it is no longer possible for us to sit back and let nature take its course. 

In the future, we must foresee the ramifications of our actions and consequently begin acting in a manner that demonstrates our reverence for the natural world, which is so uniquely beautiful.

This Author 

Drew Maglio is a writer and graduate student, currently studying at St. John’s College. Hailing from Palm Beach County, FL, Drew has a B.A. in history from Palm Beach Atlantic University, where he was a member of the Supper Honors Great Books Program.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the United States announced a proposed new rule, called a Significant New Use Rule (SNUR), regarding asbestos in June.

The EPA claimed that the rule would increase restrictions, while critics – including some current and former EPA employees – worried it could open up loopholes. Others say it doesn’t go far enough. The reality of what effect the law will have remains a little uncertain.

Asbestos is a type of naturally occurring mineral that was used widely in the United States and Europe until the 1970s, especially in the construction and automotive sectors.

Earlier rules

The material is resistant to fire and chemical corrosion and does not conduct electricity. It has been used in the production of cement, plastics, insulation, roofing shingles, floor tiles, paints and elsewhere.

Since the 1970s, however, the use of asbestos has declined significantly due to concerns about its health impacts. It is classified as a known human carcinogen and has been shown to cause mesothelioma and other forms of cancer.

The use of asbestos is banned in more than 60 countries, and the substance kills nearly 40,000 Americans a year, according to the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. It seems strange then that the EPA is proposing a rule that, if its critics are right, could bring more asbestos into the US. Here’s the explanation.

There’s room for such a rule because although the use of asbestos is restricted in the United States, it is not entirely banned.

Between 1970 and 1989, the US banned several specific uses of asbestos. In 1989, the EPA attempted to ban all new applications, meaning those developed before 1989 were exempt from the ban, except for those singled out and prohibited by earlier rules.

Boost asbestos

However, the US Circuit Court of Appeals overturned most of this ban in 1991. As a result, the only applications of asbestos the 1989 rules bans are new uses and five that the court did not overturn, which were already obsolete.

The new SNUR would require that certain non-banned uses of asbestos are subject to review by the EPA. Under the rule, companies wanting to use asbestos for these applications would have to notify the EPA, and the agency could decide to allow, regulate or prohibit the usage.

Specifically, the rule applies to what the EPA calls “currently unregulated former uses”. These applications include those that had not been banned and were active at the time of the 1991 court ruling but are no longer in use.

Health concerns are the primary reasons these uses are no longer active. In the rule, the EPA lists 15 of these market uses. The EPA has noted that, without the new rule, companies could start using asbestos for these applications without notifying the EPA.

So, if the rule involves EPA reviews of asbestos uses, why do some believe it could boost asbestos use? The problems that critics point to include the language with which the agency wrote the SNUR and the way it plans to evaluate these applications. Some also believe that the proposal does not go far enough.

Stringent

According to internal EPA emails, some agency staff are worried that the language of the SNUR would allow some uses of asbestos to avoid review. Because the rule only lists 15 applications, currently unregulated uses that the EPA did not list could potentially avoid regulation.

Another concern is related to how the agency has indicated it will review the risks associated with asbestos. According to recently released EPA documents about how the agency plans to review potentially toxic chemicals, it will not consider the impacts of potential exposure due to a chemical’s presence in the air, ground or water. It will instead look at risks associated with direct contact.

Critics say that this severely limits the scope of the review and would exclude the impacts of things like improper disposal.

The documents also narrow the definition of asbestos, meaning the EPA will not assess some asbestos-like fibers. It also will not review existing uses of asbestos or the disposal of asbestos and products containing it.

This limited scope suggests that any potential reviews of unregulated uses of asbestos likely won’t be very stringent, according to critics.

Potentially harmful

The recent EPA actions, critics point out, represent a drastic change from the original intent of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a law directing the EPA to review potentially harmful chemicals including asbestos.

When Congress strengthened the TSCA in 2016, some lawmakers saw it as a chance to try again to ban asbestos broadly. The recent EPA actions do not seem to support this notion.

The impact of these actions, especially regarding asbestos, is somewhat uncertain. There’s reason to believe, though, they will change little for the average American.

The SNUR deals mostly with market uses of asbestos that are already obsolete, primarily due to their associated health concerns. These applications have been unregulated for decades, but businesses have still opted not to use them.

Using them is not only a health risk, it would also be a tremendous financial risk for the companies due to potential lawsuits. An estimated 100 companies have been forced into bankruptcy proceedings due to asbestos liabilities.

What’s really at stake is the larger role that the EPA will play in regulating chemicals, as the way that the agency handles asbestos may be an indication of how it will treat other potentially harmful substances.

This Author

Emily Folk is a conservation and sustainability writer and the editor of Conservation Folks.

Julian Morris, as president and founder of the International Policy Network (IPN), was leading the British charge against climate science and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2003.

The London-based free market think tank published Adapt or Die: The Science, Politics and Economics of Climate Change just in time for the climate negotiations at the Conference of the Parties (COP) summit held in Milan in December. The contributor list to Adapt or Die was a veritable directory of climate sceptics from both the UK and the US.

The foreword by University of London professor Philip Stott opens with: “This book is both important and timely because it confronts one of the most tenacious myths of the new millennium, namely the dangerously mistaken belief that the correct approach to climate change is to try and ‘manage’ climate itself.”

Beautiful, engaged

Morris contributed a chapter under the title Warming Aid, Chilling Trade, in which he made the rather hilarious claim that “The international establishment, including environmentalists… have bullied two of the world’s three largest oil producers into accepting the basic proposition that global control of energy resources is really necessary.”

The book was edited by Morris’s wife, Kendra Okonski, who was also working at the IPN.

The two met when Okonski was working as a research assistant for climate denier Fred Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) – funded by Philip Morris, Dow Chemicals and ExxonMobil – after graduating from a free market college.

Okonski had gained a reputation, even among the free market zealots, as being “fiery” and determined.

Morris had been speaking at a conference called the Precautionary Principle held by American non-profit organisation Consumer Alert three years earlier, when Okonski was swept off her feet by his chiselled good looks and devotion to the free markets.

Smith recalls: “He was delivering a speech; he looked down at Kendra, with her big eyes, and thought: ‘scary’. It was a public policy marriage.”

Morris said: “Kendra is a beautiful, engaged and inspiring woman; she is the love of my life. We share a deep desire to improve the lot of humanity through the empowering institutions of a free society: property rights, markets and the rule of law. So far as I am aware, we came to those ideas independently, but I cannot speak for Kendra.”

Exxon Funding

At the time of Adapt or Die’s publication, the IPN was being heavily funded by ExxonMobil.

In 2003, the oil company donated $50,000 to Morris, his wife and their small team in Covent Garden. This would have nearly covered the entire £51,732 spent on their “climate change and sustainable development programme”.

The following year, this was increased to $115,000 in recognition of their excellent work in attacking climate science.

Martin Agerup, a contributor to Adapt or Die, was invited to London by Morris and Okonski to give a workshop on how to run a think tank. He saw no indication of generous funders behind the scenes.

“I even stayed at their private flat once, when they invited me over, and they were very cost-conscious. I think they were running on a very tight budget. I remember that they were very concerned… When I was invited over I had to fly Ryanair or something like that. A really, really cheap ticket.”

He added: “Climate was their pet issue, something they found really interesting but had difficulties finding funding for that, I think.”

Sceptic Think Tanks

Overall, ExxonMobil gave a total of £3.5 million to climate sceptic think tanks in the US during 2003.

The American Enterprise Institute was given $225,000, the Cato Institute $25,000 and the Marshall Institute $25,000. The oil giant donated a further $50,000 to the Friends of the Institute of Economic Affairs the following year for “climate change issues”.

This was entirely unrelated to the fact that the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London had just published Climate Alarmism Reconsidered by Dr Robert Bradley.

In the book’s foreword, Philip Booth, the IEA’s Editorial and Programme Director, wrote: “scary climate scenarios are not supported by the balance of evidence. What is known with far more confidence is that a moderately warmer and wetter world has significant benefits to offset costs for many decades to come.”

The publication was written with the help of the Morris, CEI and Exxon-funded scientists Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels.

Morris remained busy going into 2004. He gave a presentation at free marketeer Friedrich von Hayek’s old stomping ground, the Mont Pelerin Society – one of many neoliberal think tanks that Hayek set up – and told the assembled economists that it would be the free market rather than regulations that would solve the problem of climate change, if there were indeed a problem.

This Author

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

Standing on the southern edge of our 3,500-acre rewilding project on a June day, on the brow of one of Knepp Estate’s few elevations, one would be forgiven for imagining oneself gazing on African savannah.

This does not look like West Sussex – or anywhere else in England, come to that. The rough grassland, a riot of anthills, is punctuated by fists of thorny scrub. Hedgerows have billowed out into swathes of unruly brush. Weaving between them, a filigree of dusty trails signals the wanderings of large herds of ungulates.

The air is thick with birdsong, many of them African in origin – swallows, house martins, swifts, lesser whitethroats, chiffchaffs, willow warblers, reed warblers, garden warblers, Cetti’s warblers. You can hear cuckoos, often several at once and, at night, competitive clusters of  nightingales send thrilling, unsettling arias into the darkness, interrupted by the occasional nightjar. This is perhaps the only place in the UK where numbers of turtle doves are rising.

Rare species

There is a wildness here, an untrammelled exuberance, pulsing with life, that is so unfamiliar, so essentially un-British, that visitors naturally seek comparisons with foreign parts – the scrublands of the Serengeti, or the Deccan in India, perhaps.

They expect you to turn a corner and see a herd of buffalo or a leopard up a tree. It feels as though anything could happen here, and sometimes it does.

The number of visitations from extremely rare species is rising – last year, a Montagu’s harrier and a black stork flew over, checking us out, a black tern settled on the lake, peregrine falcons nested in a Scots pine for the second time and, in the summer, a red-backed shrike struck up his territory on a hawthorn, impalingemperor dragonflies. 

In February this year, a pair of great white egrets paced the winter water-meadows and, in March, a black redstart appeared in the park. It is almost impossible to remember the time, only fifteen years or so ago, when this landscape was fields of maize, barley, wheat, as far as the eye could see, a  desert in terms of biodiversity.

Agri-chemical assault

We took the decision to come out of in-hand farming in 2000. For decades the farm – mixed arable and dairy – had run at a loss but in the 1990s  those losses became unsustainable. Categorised as grade 4, or grade 3 at best, our land has never lent itself to modern intensive production.

We are hampered by poor drainage, small, hedged fields and our heavy soil – 300 metres of Low Weald clay over a bedrock of limestone. It is like concrete in summer, and, in winter, unfathomable porridge, preventing any access to the land by heavy machinery after the first rains of autumn.

The idea to rewild came off the back of the restoration of the nineteenth-century Repton park around the house. Ploughed up in World War Two as part of Britain’s ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, the land had been in constant production ever since.

In 2001, however, we received funding from the Country Stewardship Scheme to restore the park, providing breathing space for, among other things, veteran oaks suffering from agri-chemical assault.

Returning these 140 hectares to permanent pasture, re-seeding with native Low Weald flowers and grasses, and introducing fallow deer as grazers, was a revelation.

Dynamic processes

The following summer we walked knee-deep through oxeye daisies, bird’s-foot trefoil, ragged robin, knapweed, red clover, ladies’ bedstraw, crested dog’s tail and sweet vernal grass, kicking up clouds of butterflies, our ears thrumming with the sound of bumble bees, hoverflies and grasshoppers – something we hadn’t even known we’d been missing.

The land itself seemed to be breathing a sigh of relief. For us, it was the psychological breakthrough that allowed us to look at the Estate with fresh eyes, to dare to break with our farming tradition. It showed us the potential of working with the land, rather than constantly battling against it.

Our park restoration coincided with the publication, in 2000, of the ground-breaking publication Grazing Ecology and Forest History by the visionary Dutch ecologist Frans Vera, and a visit to his naturalistic grazing project, the Oostvaardersplassen in Holland, expanded our horizons exponentially.

We realised we had the potential to do something much wilder and more exciting than a conventional park restoration in other areas of the Estate.

By introducing a suite of other herbivores – Exmoor ponies, Tamworth pigs and old English longhorn cattle – in addition to red deer  and fallow deer, and allowing them free-rein to trample, rootle, wallow, puddle, ring-bark, graze, browse and dung where they liked, we could kick-start dynamic natural processes on our land; we could use them to prevent the succession of species-poor closed canopy woods on our ex-arable fields, creating something much more interesting and diverse instead.

Financial constraints

In effect, they would be acting as proxies of the tarpan, wild boar and aurochs – some of the big-hitting megafauna that once roamed our countryside disturbing the soil and battling with vegetation succession, transferring seeds and nutrients across the landscape, driving habitat complexity.

In 2003, we managed to secure funding from Countryside Stewardship to roll a park restoration across just over half of the land, enabling us to reseed with a mix of native grasses, take up internal fencing and gates, ring-fence boundaries and release free-roaming animals to graze and disturb. 

But there was no such funding forthcoming for the rest of the Estate, known as the Southern Block – an area of 1,100 acres (450 hectares).

At a loss as to what to do, and with contract farming actually costing us money,  we had no alternative but to step back and leave the land to its own devices. We had begun taking the lowest yielding fields out of production in 2001, and continued in increments over the following five years.

Unable to pay for a boundary fence and with, therefore, no immediate prospect of introducing herbivores here, we decided to avoid the cost of re-seeding with a native grass mix. We simply left the fields as they were after the last harvest of maize, wheat, barley or whatever crop they happened to be growing.

Headline successes 

It was an uneasy and discomforting hiatus – it felt like we were literally turning our backs on the land, pressing pause on our naturalistic grazing experiment – but, ironically, it was rocket-fuel for rewilding. 

Our haphazard process of letting the land go, combined with no re-seeding of grass and a delay in introducing the heavy-hitting herbivores generated opportunities for wildlife that were far more exciting than anything we were doing elsewhere.

It wasn’t until 2009 that we received Higher Level Stewardship funding for the whole project, enabling us – at last – to introduce grazing animals into this final area in 2010. By then, thorny scrub had begun to take off here, providing a nursery for jay-planted oak saplings and the spontaneous germination of crab apples and wild service, as well as protective cover for invertebrates, birds and small mammals, and a cornucopia of berries for over-wintering birds.

Eruptions of sallow (hybrid willow) germinating in the damp, open soil, has given rise to the largest colony of purple emperor butterflies in the UK.

By the time free-roaming animals were introduced,plenty of browsing as well as grazing was available to them, providing a richer food supply. The ensuing battle between animal disturbance and vegetation succession has increased habitat complexity even further. This is now by far the wildest area of the rewilding project and source of most of our headline wildlife successes – the part that looks like Africa.

Valuable scrubland

It is also the area that has, understandably, proved most challenging for our neighbours. For many, the natural landscape of Southern England is a patchwork of neatly hedged fields and ditches, small copses and bare, rolling Downland. It is an idyll that has become lodged in our subconscious, invested with nostalgia, an image considered to be balanced and harmonious.

Scrubland does not feature anywhere in this idealised country. Demonised by farmers, landowners and gardeners alike it is considered ‘wasteland’ – messy, worthless, a waste of space, a sign of neglect or mismanagement. 

But it was not always so, as Knepp’s own field names suggest. Benton’s Gorse, Stub Mead, Faggot Stack Plat, Bramble Field, Broom Field, Cooper Reeds, Broomers Corner and numerous Furzefields (‘furze’ is an old Sussex name for gorse) point to a time when scrub was valued for myriad uses – for everything from tool handles  and basketry, animal fodder and, fuel, dyes, medicines and gunpowder, hurdles and charcoal. 

Time was – and not so long ago – when scrub was cherished. But almost all the purposes for which it was once used are now satisfied by plastic and mass-produced alternatives. Chainsaws and mechanised diggers have enabled us to eradicate it wherever it dares to appear.

One of the richest habitats for nature is now deemed ‘unnatural’. Even conservationists, bent on keeping areas designated for nature in stasis for the preservation of targeted species, often find the morphing, unpredictable, impenetrable character of scrubland hard to countenance. Fortunes are spent every year on its eradication, with scrub-bashing a staple activity of conservation volunteers.

Optimistic future

But the accidental reappearance of scrub at Knepp, and the astonishing resurgence of wildlife it has encouraged, in such a short space of time, shows extraordinary potential – and not just for the recovery of rare and declining species. The implications underlying the project are enormous.

Knepp shows how rewilding the land leads to other forms of provision vital for the public good – ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, water storage, air purification, ethical meat production, human health and recreation. It even demonstrates an alternative, low-cost, natural way of re-establishing woodland – without the need for carbon-intensive polypropylene cylinders, tanalized wooden stakes and high maintenance planting by human hand. 

But perhaps most important of all and, inevitably, connected to all the above, it addresses one of the most pressing concerns facing farming today – soil degradation.

Centuries of relentlessly ploughing without regard for soil structure, of applying chemicals to the land and destroying soil biota, have led to catastrophic levels of soil erosion. According to the National Farmers’ Union we have fewer than a hundred harvests left in the country before we have no topsoil left in which to plant crops.

At Knepp, the appearance of fruiting fungi such as Boletus mendax (a mycorrhizal mushroom associated with old oaks), and milkcaps and fly agaric in our sallow scrub, as well as common spotted, southern marsh and early purple orchids (plants that depend on subterranean mycorrhizal fungi) in our former arable fields, is a clear indication that our soils are reviving.

Soil restoration

In 2013 a study by Imperial College London found an exponential rise in the abundance and variety of earthworms compared with neighbouring farmland with the same soils and under the same conventional agriculture as previously at Knepp. In total, we have now found 19 species of earthworm – a diversity that, according to soil scientists, is extraordinarily high.  

So Knepp points the way to a low-cost system of soil restoration – a model that could be rolled out across marginal land likely to fall out of agriculture in the post-Brexit shake-up of farming subsidies, and that may prove vital even for Grade 1 agricultural land.

Scale, of course, is key in order to allow process-led systems to function but already we are seeing ‘farm clusters’ – groups of small farms – clubbing together to achieve landscape-scale restoration together. 

Knepp shows how rewilding could, if we wish, bring about incalculable public benefits. But if we are to embrace it we need to re-educate our sensibilities. Knepp is a signal reminder of our need to embrace messy, exuberant scrubland once again, to allow it space in the landscape – and in our hearts.  

This Author 

Isabella Tree is an award-winning journalist and author of Wilding: the Return of Nature to a British Farm (2018). She will be giving a talk at the Tree Conference in Frome next weekend