We have spent our careers campaigning for our fragile environment. We are also vegans – we have chosen not to use any product which derives from the use of animals.

You may think this puts us fairly high up the chart of smug, self-satisfied do-gooders. But, as The Vegan Society launches the latest phase of its Plate Up For the Planet campaign, we are not writing to lecture or hector you.

We are not wagging our fingers, or tutting loudly while you order your lunch. Instead, we are asking for your understanding, your patience, and ultimately your respect.

Good conscience

Food unites and divides us. It brings us together to share meals and special occasions, but causes upset when we can’t agree on what food is best, or ethically correct for us to eat.

We know that vegans get a bad press – we’re awkward, we’re stubborn, why can’t we just have the cheese sandwich like everyone else?

We can’t just have the cheese sandwich because we know the devastating effect that animal agriculture has. Animal farming is a greater contributor to climate change than transport, it’s destroying precious habitats, both here and in the Amazon.

It’s a hugely inefficient food choice, giving us only 12 calories back for every 100 we feed to animals. With a vegan diet, we’re cutting our food emissions by up to 50 percent, halving our land use, and if we all opted for vegan we could feed 3 billion more people.

It’s pretty clear that veganism is the best ‘off the shelf’ diet for the environment. We can’t in good conscience, just go with the flow. This is too important.

Never look back

So, forgive us for our inconvenient statistics. Humour our persistent attempts to get you to try our home-made houmous.

And please respect that the choice we have made comes not from a desire to be difficult, or a need to be noticed, but from a deep-seated belief that veganism is the only way forward for future generations.

It’s time that those who care about our planet positioned veganism as an aspiration, not as an extreme. We need to be far more bolder than ‘eating less meat’ if we are to protect our precious planet.

Please join us by taking part in the seven-day Plate Up for the Planet challenge here. You may find you never look back.

These Authors

George Monbiot is the country’s leading environmental journalist and author. Kerry McCarthy is the MP for Bristol East. Dale Vince is the founder of Ecotricity. Jonathan Bartley is Green Party co-leader. This is an open letter to environmentalists first published with the Vegan Society to support its Plate Up for the Planet challenge. 

We are witnessing a dramatic reduction in biodiversity in the natural world. Humans, who represent 0.01 percent of life on earth, have destroyed 83 percent of wildlife in the last 150 years, devastated the planet.

Agriculture – and in particular the rearing of animals for meat – has resulted in a significant reduction in the range and number of wild animals.

Simultaneously – and apparently separately – we have witnessed an equal reduction in the diversity of our media. There once thrived in the United Kingdom thousands of local newspapers which were close to and directly accountable to their readers.

Viewing the world

These newspapers had their own reporters in Fleet Street, sending news back from Parliament and the courts.

This was alongside a national newspaper ecology which had dozens of titles, which thrived by sending thousands of reports around the country and also from ‘feeding’ on the rich diversity of information from local newspapers.

Like our natural world, this informational world has also been devastated. What we have seen is the emergence of a very few monopoly companies which have made vast profits by taking complexity and reducing it to simplicity, transforming a rich news ecology into something akin to a supermarket carpark.

The comparison between the natural environment and the news environment is a strong metaphor. But it may be more than that.

We can examine this by using systems thinking. Firstly, I need to be explicit about my subjectivity and explain the standpoint from which I am viewing the world. I will keep this to two points. 

Interconnected systems

The first point is ontological. I begin with the proposition that everything in our universe is changing, in every way through all time. It is also changing in a particular way. This is expressed through the second law of thermodynamics – entropy. This can be expressed more simply, and more poetically, as “things fall apart”.

The second point is about my ethics and our human agency. Systems are important to us because systems tell us something about how, in this constantly changing world, we can sustain some kind of order – some kind of continuity.

By this I mean: how can we – as a recognisable species – survive. There is an ethical decision in deciding survival is important. It is subjective, and it changes how I – and very many others – see the world.

If you don’t care about survival, you can happily ignore the lessons that can be drawn from systems as they exist in nature. So what do we learn from natural systems?

We can look at nature as a collection of nested and interconnected systems. There has been 3.5 billion years of life on earth. In that time, things that are most resilient and which extend across the most time are most abundant today. And these things are open systems. 

Things that are cyclical

These systems are defined by being separate but intimately related to what is around them. They can be abstracted out as single things. They have a boundary between the system, and everything else.

Open systems have a semi-permeable membrane. It keeps parts of the system from breaching out, but allows some things in. Open systems exchange energy or information with their environment. They are self sustaining. In terms of nature, life systems repeat themselves through birth and rebirth.

In nature, things that function in this way remain in existence in some form over very long periods of time. You are descended, it seems most likely, from the very first life form. Things that do not function in this way, are only around for a relatively short period of time.

Things that are linear will over time either become too much or too little. Things that are cyclical – where waste becomes food for example – will continue for significantly longer. Systems that function with homeostasis – everything from the human body to the climate – will retain integrity across long periods of time.  

Humans – who have been in this world in their current form for perhaps less than 100,000 years – find themselves surrounded by things that are cyclical, that are systems that reproduce themselves. Everything else has withered away or subsumed all around it.

Transfer information

There are, therefore, many useful concepts for sustainability that come from systems theory. The most important for me – when thinking about both nature and the media – is diversity.

The second is that fact that any system is directly and strongly related to its natural environment. It coevolves with its environment. Its ability to sustain itself rests on its impact on its environment. This is where it derives the matter, the energy, the information, to sustain its own continued existence.

So, how do we usefully transpose these lessons from nature into the media industry? Firstly, we need to understand each media organisation as a system.

It is made up of people, which are each systems and when working together form new, larger systems. The function of the media organisation is to gather information from its environment, to metabolise it – to sort it, select it, to write it into articles – and then to publish it.

This media organisation also needs readers. It needs to transfer information out into the world around it. The media organisation is like a dung beetle, nature’s muck-spreader. 

Media organisation

The dung beetle takes the energy from its environment, and then through a series of complex processes transforms this into information, into DNA, which is then passed on through to its tiny little dung beetles offspring. In this process, the structure and pattern of ‘a dung beetle’ continues. It’s waste is returned to the environment and the cycle continues. 

The media organisation likewise creates an immediate output – printed pages, website pages – which is exported to the environment around it. It also creates a structure and pattern – its staff, its offices (if there are any), its email lists and its regular readers, which allows it to continue to function and exist.

To have a single news organisation which functions correctly, which can be sustained over many years and decades, you need a vibrant and diverse ecosystem. You need an abundance of matter, energy and information.

You need human beings – journalists – to perform the metabolism of information so the end result is useful and valuable and not just white noise, or worse: Twitter.

The comparison between the systems of nature and the media organisation as a system is useful beyond being a simple metaphor for a second, vital reason.

Complex nature

This is because it is the same thing threatening and disrupting our natural environment and our media environment – and that thing is also a system.

We tend to call this system, ‘capitalism’. Capitalism at its root involves an investor advancing £100 and then at the end of a year expecting that to be £110 (if they invest well).

For the investor, this extra £10 is a product of her wise investment choices. But if we transpose the first law of thermodynamics – that matter cannot come from nothing or go back to nothing – to the social, to the the financial world, we conclude that this £10 cannot simply appear from nowhere.

Indeed, this £10 has come from a customer in exchange for some raw material (nature) which has been transformed through work (which is also a form of nature) into a commodity for sale – say, a newspaper. The system of capitalism is all the structures and patterns which make this investment function.

The schools, the offices, the factories, the bank balances and the people. The media. The work of capitalism reproduces this system. And the work is a form of metabolism. It is the transformation of complex nature (trees, fields, animals, people) into simple objects or commodities used for exchange.

Grows exponentially

The exchange brings the investor her £10. Nature is depleted and the symbol of money is increased. That is the core purpose and function of the capitalist system.

The problem is that with investment – and with capitalism more generally – you are looking at exponential growth. The following year the investor will advance £110 and expect £121. After a decade this single investment has become £259 – and after a century, £1,378,061.

This is great for the investor, but that £1.3m is also represented in depleted nature – in trees becoming carbon dioxide, in oil becoming plastics, becoming landfill. Capitalism as a system achieves economic growth, exponential growth, by metabolising – by breaking down – all the complex systems in its own environment and replacing it with literal rubbish.

We know that we cannot sustain exponential growth on a finite planet. Even if we do nothing, the capitalist system cannot function for ever. It’s a non-sustainable system and therefore a poor choice for humans who value continued human existence.

The investment of the single investor grows exponentially. In perfect conditions, all the investments grow in this way. What we then witness is the accumulation of capital. However smart or dumb – think Donald Trump – the investor is, the very fact they hold capital is a fairly good indication that sooner or later they will hold even more capital. This capital ‘clumps’; diverse ecosystems of companies become dominated by complex monopolies, and then pure monopolies. 

Slow, lucrative, death

So what has capitalism done to the ecology of newspapers? It is a clear example of this very same process. Rupert Murdoch inherited his father’s newspaper business. That was the best decision he ever made.

Murdoch began essentially with our £259 investment described above. He used this investment to buy rival newspapers, asset stripping, reducing quality, firing journalists, initiating price wars and dominating markets.

In the 1980s he bought four newspapers – The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World. He took a complex ecosystem and stripped it into a monopoly. He transformed a complex ecosystem into numbers on a spreadsheet.

Murdoch sacked printers, he sacked journalists. He replaced high quality information – extracted from the natural environment through great effort – with made-up stories. He ripped stories off from rival papers, and local papers, and contributed nothing to the cost of those news organisations. He forced a price war on his competitors, reducing the input of money and confining smaller rivals to starvation. 

The newspaper monopoly now dominant in the UK has so rapidly consumed everything of value in its environment, and so polluted that environment with disinformation, that they can no longer function as newspapers themselves. “Newspapers are dying,” goes a quote attributed to Murdoch. “It will be slow, lucrative, death”. 

Off Grid

Indeed, we can almost say today that there are no newspapers left. The latest stage of decay is George Osborne selling news copy to major corporate monopoly companies for £500,000 from each firm. This means today there is no ‘mainstream’ newspaper industry, just a public relations industry.

I am writing this in advance of the Off Grid festival. The concept of being ‘off grid’ was first introduced to me by Nick Rosen, author of How to Live Off Grid, as a way of living: setting up a home with its own renewable energy supply, its own water system for both for inputs and outflow.

It can also mean establishing a vegetable garden so that the home becomes autonomous in producing food. This is essentially creating a sustainable, largely self-contained system.

But I can’t help but take the idea of off grid further. For me, one grid that exists is the mainstream media. This is now a complex monopoly – a single grid. This is a hierarchical system. It is fixed, sclerotic. And this form of media is simply part of a wider grid – the system of capitalism.

To be off grid can mean more than building a home and disconnecting from the National Grid. It is also ‘growing’ a complex, interconnected network of systems disconnected from and separate to capitalist corporate media, from the world of investment and exchange. 

Finding systems

This is an ecosystem that is diverse, self sustaining, mutually supporting and co-evolving. It is resilient communities that are mutually dependent and therefore independent. It is taking back control. Off grid communities need to share information, they need “off grid journalism”. And off grid journalism, to be sustainable, needs to be “systems journalism”.

So where – finally – we arrive at systems journalism. I feel we are about to witness the emergence of systems journalism in two ways. The first is the function of journalism itself. The second is how new organisations of journalism will learn to remain autonomous, and become sustainable. 

This first point is about the subject matter of journalism. What should we write about? And I would argue that what we have in our newspapers is the very opposite of systems journalism.

The news is about personalities, it is about celebrities. It is a distraction, and fundamentally a waste of our time and attention. We simply do not need to know what some celebrity says on Twitter. If we do want to know this, we can search Twitter. More proudly, what that person said on Twitter is unlikely to really impact our lives, unless we want it to. 

The death of the mainstream media leaves fertile ground. There is an unmet social need for good journalism. What we need to start doing as journalists is finding systems, examining systems, explaining the importance of systems. Systems, understood in this way, can include major corporations, states and governments, schools – even football teams.

Social inputs

This is because the single most important issues of the day are at their core about the functioning – and malfunctioning – of systems. How does capitalism function within nature? What impact is the fossil fuel industry having on the climate system?

Can we yet imagine a system of human civilisation that works with – and within – the system of the earth’s biosphere? Are we any closer to entering “the Noosphere”. How can we transfer from the current system to this imagined system? How does change in systems work?

These are the questions that we as a human species need to confront in the coming years, and decades – if we wish to survive.

Journalism that examines and understands systems can form a useful part of a civic society ecosystem that can change or influence these meta-systems. When it comes to company sized systems, this reporting involves understanding the inputs, outputs, feedbacks, structures and patterns of the organisation. Knowing this, a journalist and her readers are better placed to influence its function – for good or ill.

By understanding the governance and structure of ExxonMobil, by explicitly understanding how as a system it relies on material input (oil, investment) and also social inputs (trust of its stakeholders, the work performed by its management and its workforce) we can interact with that system in a more impactful way.

Creative sharing

We can find the inputs that allow ExxonMobil to sustain itself as a system, we can form an analysis of which of these inputs are most important – and which are most vulnerable.

We as journalists can transfer this knowledge to civic society groups and individual campaigners. The news organisation gathers information about ExxonMobil, using its senses to find and filter the most important information, metabolises that information and then disseminates it. It forms its function as a system.

The second aspect of systems journalism – how it can sustain itself – is equally important. This involves understand each individual reporter as a system and also each news organisation as a system, as I started to describe above.

This human being needs energy, food, shelter and companionship in order to function. In our society such things are gained through money. So we need to find a way of financially supporting independent journalists. Or we can find direct ways to meet the human needs of journalists to sustain their work.

Individuals can also come together to form larger systems – teams and organisations. This may take the form of The Ecologist, The Bristol Cable, New Internationalist. Indeed, it can take the form of the website of the Off Grid festival.

Smash, build, heal and tame

The coming together allows for emergent qualities not available to single journalists – the creative sharing of ideas, mutual support, and to some extent specialism and critical mass. How do we feed these groups of people, how do we feed them with information?

What we must recognise as systems journalists is that we cannot act like monopoly journalists. We cannot feed off our communities and other journalists – while at the same time polluting our environments with fake news and poor research.

We need diversity – in our identities, in our ideas, in our ways of expressing ourselves. This allows for discovery through creativity. 

We need to stop acting as individual agents and begin to work fully as communities of people, or living organisms, that coevolve and freely exchange matter, energy, information.

We need to decentralise power, to empower those around us. We need to break down the boundary around professional and community journalism. In the (forthcoming) words of Graham Jones in The Shock Doctrine of the Left, we need to smash, build, heal and tame. 

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.

We are witnessing a dramatic reduction in biodiversity in the natural world. Humans, who represent 0.01 percent of life on earth, have destroyed 83 percent of wildlife in the last 150 years, devastated the planet.

Agriculture – and in particular the rearing of animals for meat – has resulted in a significant reduction in the range and number of wild animals.

Simultaneously – and apparently separately – we have witnessed an equal reduction in the diversity of our media. There once thrived in the United Kingdom thousands of local newspapers which were close to and directly accountable to their readers.

Viewing the world

These newspapers had their own reporters in Fleet Street, sending news back from Parliament and the courts.

This was alongside a national newspaper ecology which had dozens of titles, which thrived by sending thousands of reports around the country and also from ‘feeding’ on the rich diversity of information from local newspapers.

Like our natural world, this informational world has also been devastated. What we have seen is the emergence of a very few monopoly companies which have made vast profits by taking complexity and reducing it to simplicity, transforming a rich news ecology into something akin to a supermarket carpark.

The comparison between the natural environment and the news environment is a strong metaphor. But it may be more than that.

We can examine this by using systems thinking. Firstly, I need to be explicit about my subjectivity and explain the standpoint from which I am viewing the world. I will keep this to two points. 

Interconnected systems

The first point is ontological. I begin with the proposition that everything in our universe is changing, in every way through all time. It is also changing in a particular way. This is expressed through the second law of thermodynamics – entropy. This can be expressed more simply, and more poetically, as “things fall apart”.

The second point is about my ethics and our human agency. Systems are important to us because systems tell us something about how, in this constantly changing world, we can sustain some kind of order – some kind of continuity.

By this I mean: how can we – as a recognisable species – survive. There is an ethical decision in deciding survival is important. It is subjective, and it changes how I – and very many others – see the world.

If you don’t care about survival, you can happily ignore the lessons that can be drawn from systems as they exist in nature. So what do we learn from natural systems?

We can look at nature as a collection of nested and interconnected systems. There has been 3.5 billion years of life on earth. In that time, things that are most resilient and which extend across the most time are most abundant today. And these things are open systems. 

Things that are cyclical

These systems are defined by being separate but intimately related to what is around them. They can be abstracted out as single things. They have a boundary between the system, and everything else.

Open systems have a semi-permeable membrane. It keeps parts of the system from breaching out, but allows some things in. Open systems exchange energy or information with their environment. They are self sustaining. In terms of nature, life systems repeat themselves through birth and rebirth.

In nature, things that function in this way remain in existence in some form over very long periods of time. You are descended, it seems most likely, from the very first life form. Things that do not function in this way, are only around for a relatively short period of time.

Things that are linear will over time either become too much or too little. Things that are cyclical – where waste becomes food for example – will continue for significantly longer. Systems that function with homeostasis – everything from the human body to the climate – will retain integrity across long periods of time.  

Humans – who have been in this world in their current form for perhaps less than 100,000 years – find themselves surrounded by things that are cyclical, that are systems that reproduce themselves. Everything else has withered away or subsumed all around it.

Transfer information

There are, therefore, many useful concepts for sustainability that come from systems theory. The most important for me – when thinking about both nature and the media – is diversity.

The second is that fact that any system is directly and strongly related to its natural environment. It coevolves with its environment. Its ability to sustain itself rests on its impact on its environment. This is where it derives the matter, the energy, the information, to sustain its own continued existence.

So, how do we usefully transpose these lessons from nature into the media industry? Firstly, we need to understand each media organisation as a system.

It is made up of people, which are each systems and when working together form new, larger systems. The function of the media organisation is to gather information from its environment, to metabolise it – to sort it, select it, to write it into articles – and then to publish it.

This media organisation also needs readers. It needs to transfer information out into the world around it. The media organisation is like a dung beetle, nature’s muck-spreader. 

Media organisation

The dung beetle takes the energy from its environment, and then through a series of complex processes transforms this into information, into DNA, which is then passed on through to its tiny little dung beetles offspring. In this process, the structure and pattern of ‘a dung beetle’ continues. It’s waste is returned to the environment and the cycle continues. 

The media organisation likewise creates an immediate output – printed pages, website pages – which is exported to the environment around it. It also creates a structure and pattern – its staff, its offices (if there are any), its email lists and its regular readers, which allows it to continue to function and exist.

To have a single news organisation which functions correctly, which can be sustained over many years and decades, you need a vibrant and diverse ecosystem. You need an abundance of matter, energy and information.

You need human beings – journalists – to perform the metabolism of information so the end result is useful and valuable and not just white noise, or worse: Twitter.

The comparison between the systems of nature and the media organisation as a system is useful beyond being a simple metaphor for a second, vital reason.

Complex nature

This is because it is the same thing threatening and disrupting our natural environment and our media environment – and that thing is also a system.

We tend to call this system, ‘capitalism’. Capitalism at its root involves an investor advancing £100 and then at the end of a year expecting that to be £110 (if they invest well).

For the investor, this extra £10 is a product of her wise investment choices. But if we transpose the first law of thermodynamics – that matter cannot come from nothing or go back to nothing – to the social, to the the financial world, we conclude that this £10 cannot simply appear from nowhere.

Indeed, this £10 has come from a customer in exchange for some raw material (nature) which has been transformed through work (which is also a form of nature) into a commodity for sale – say, a newspaper. The system of capitalism is all the structures and patterns which make this investment function.

The schools, the offices, the factories, the bank balances and the people. The media. The work of capitalism reproduces this system. And the work is a form of metabolism. It is the transformation of complex nature (trees, fields, animals, people) into simple objects or commodities used for exchange.

Grows exponentially

The exchange brings the investor her £10. Nature is depleted and the symbol of money is increased. That is the core purpose and function of the capitalist system.

The problem is that with investment – and with capitalism more generally – you are looking at exponential growth. The following year the investor will advance £110 and expect £121. After a decade this single investment has become £259 – and after a century, £1,378,061.

This is great for the investor, but that £1.3m is also represented in depleted nature – in trees becoming carbon dioxide, in oil becoming plastics, becoming landfill. Capitalism as a system achieves economic growth, exponential growth, by metabolising – by breaking down – all the complex systems in its own environment and replacing it with literal rubbish.

We know that we cannot sustain exponential growth on a finite planet. Even if we do nothing, the capitalist system cannot function for ever. It’s a non-sustainable system and therefore a poor choice for humans who value continued human existence.

The investment of the single investor grows exponentially. In perfect conditions, all the investments grow in this way. What we then witness is the accumulation of capital. However smart or dumb – think Donald Trump – the investor is, the very fact they hold capital is a fairly good indication that sooner or later they will hold even more capital. This capital ‘clumps’; diverse ecosystems of companies become dominated by complex monopolies, and then pure monopolies. 

Slow, lucrative, death

So what has capitalism done to the ecology of newspapers? It is a clear example of this very same process. Rupert Murdoch inherited his father’s newspaper business. That was the best decision he ever made.

Murdoch began essentially with our £259 investment described above. He used this investment to buy rival newspapers, asset stripping, reducing quality, firing journalists, initiating price wars and dominating markets.

In the 1980s he bought four newspapers – The Times, The Sunday Times, The Sun and The News of the World. He took a complex ecosystem and stripped it into a monopoly. He transformed a complex ecosystem into numbers on a spreadsheet.

Murdoch sacked printers, he sacked journalists. He replaced high quality information – extracted from the natural environment through great effort – with made-up stories. He ripped stories off from rival papers, and local papers, and contributed nothing to the cost of those news organisations. He forced a price war on his competitors, reducing the input of money and confining smaller rivals to starvation. 

The newspaper monopoly now dominant in the UK has so rapidly consumed everything of value in its environment, and so polluted that environment with disinformation, that they can no longer function as newspapers themselves. “Newspapers are dying,” goes a quote attributed to Murdoch. “It will be slow, lucrative, death”. 

Off Grid

Indeed, we can almost say today that there are no newspapers left. The latest stage of decay is George Osborne selling news copy to major corporate monopoly companies for £500,000 from each firm. This means today there is no ‘mainstream’ newspaper industry, just a public relations industry.

I am writing this in advance of the Off Grid festival. The concept of being ‘off grid’ was first introduced to me by Nick Rosen, author of How to Live Off Grid, as a way of living: setting up a home with its own renewable energy supply, its own water system for both for inputs and outflow.

It can also mean establishing a vegetable garden so that the home becomes autonomous in producing food. This is essentially creating a sustainable, largely self-contained system.

But I can’t help but take the idea of off grid further. For me, one grid that exists is the mainstream media. This is now a complex monopoly – a single grid. This is a hierarchical system. It is fixed, sclerotic. And this form of media is simply part of a wider grid – the system of capitalism.

To be off grid can mean more than building a home and disconnecting from the National Grid. It is also ‘growing’ a complex, interconnected network of systems disconnected from and separate to capitalist corporate media, from the world of investment and exchange. 

Finding systems

This is an ecosystem that is diverse, self sustaining, mutually supporting and co-evolving. It is resilient communities that are mutually dependent and therefore independent. It is taking back control. Off grid communities need to share information, they need “off grid journalism”. And off grid journalism, to be sustainable, needs to be “systems journalism”.

So where – finally – we arrive at systems journalism. I feel we are about to witness the emergence of systems journalism in two ways. The first is the function of journalism itself. The second is how new organisations of journalism will learn to remain autonomous, and become sustainable. 

This first point is about the subject matter of journalism. What should we write about? And I would argue that what we have in our newspapers is the very opposite of systems journalism.

The news is about personalities, it is about celebrities. It is a distraction, and fundamentally a waste of our time and attention. We simply do not need to know what some celebrity says on Twitter. If we do want to know this, we can search Twitter. More proudly, what that person said on Twitter is unlikely to really impact our lives, unless we want it to. 

The death of the mainstream media leaves fertile ground. There is an unmet social need for good journalism. What we need to start doing as journalists is finding systems, examining systems, explaining the importance of systems. Systems, understood in this way, can include major corporations, states and governments, schools – even football teams.

Social inputs

This is because the single most important issues of the day are at their core about the functioning – and malfunctioning – of systems. How does capitalism function within nature? What impact is the fossil fuel industry having on the climate system?

Can we yet imagine a system of human civilisation that works with – and within – the system of the earth’s biosphere? Are we any closer to entering “the Noosphere”. How can we transfer from the current system to this imagined system? How does change in systems work?

These are the questions that we as a human species need to confront in the coming years, and decades – if we wish to survive.

Journalism that examines and understands systems can form a useful part of a civic society ecosystem that can change or influence these meta-systems. When it comes to company sized systems, this reporting involves understanding the inputs, outputs, feedbacks, structures and patterns of the organisation. Knowing this, a journalist and her readers are better placed to influence its function – for good or ill.

By understanding the governance and structure of ExxonMobil, by explicitly understanding how as a system it relies on material input (oil, investment) and also social inputs (trust of its stakeholders, the work performed by its management and its workforce) we can interact with that system in a more impactful way.

Creative sharing

We can find the inputs that allow ExxonMobil to sustain itself as a system, we can form an analysis of which of these inputs are most important – and which are most vulnerable.

We as journalists can transfer this knowledge to civic society groups and individual campaigners. The news organisation gathers information about ExxonMobil, using its senses to find and filter the most important information, metabolises that information and then disseminates it. It forms its function as a system.

The second aspect of systems journalism – how it can sustain itself – is equally important. This involves understand each individual reporter as a system and also each news organisation as a system, as I started to describe above.

This human being needs energy, food, shelter and companionship in order to function. In our society such things are gained through money. So we need to find a way of financially supporting independent journalists. Or we can find direct ways to meet the human needs of journalists to sustain their work.

Individuals can also come together to form larger systems – teams and organisations. This may take the form of The Ecologist, The Bristol Cable, New Internationalist. Indeed, it can take the form of the website of the Off Grid festival.

Smash, build, heal and tame

The coming together allows for emergent qualities not available to single journalists – the creative sharing of ideas, mutual support, and to some extent specialism and critical mass. How do we feed these groups of people, how do we feed them with information?

What we must recognise as systems journalists is that we cannot act like monopoly journalists. We cannot feed off our communities and other journalists – while at the same time polluting our environments with fake news and poor research.

We need diversity – in our identities, in our ideas, in our ways of expressing ourselves. This allows for discovery through creativity. 

We need to stop acting as individual agents and begin to work fully as communities of people, or living organisms, that coevolve and freely exchange matter, energy, information.

We need to decentralise power, to empower those around us. We need to break down the boundary around professional and community journalism. In the (forthcoming) words of Graham Jones, we need to smash, build, heal and tame. 

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.

The Ecologist explores the causes of environmental degradation and the impact of our societies on the natural world, and this can be insightful, necessary – but overwhelming. So The Ecologist is increasingly seeking the solutions, successes and hope that will steer us into the future.

The Ecologist was established in 1970, and in its lifetime has sparked and nurtured organisations like Friends of the Earth and the Green Party, exposed the shocking environmental records of huge corporations like Monsanto, and initiated multiple global campaigns. You can learn more about the history of The Ecologist here. 

It’s mission has always been to deepen the public understanding of the relationship between human society and the natural environment. This remains more relevant today than ever before. 

Recognise complexity

We are now entering a new era in our history. As well as celebrating solutions, The Ecologist will look to systems theory and social ecology to more deeply understand the interconnectedness of the issues that affect us all. You can read more about our way of being by scrolling down to the ‘themes’ section of our About Us page.

The world has changed significantly in the lifetime of The Ecologist – and so too has the magazine. It has evolved from small print journal, to national news magazine, to a global online news organisation.

And to remain a platform that is respected and valued globally, it must be in tune with what its readers and contributors are saying and wanting. To that end, The Ecologist has been asking questions about who it serves and how it can better support them.

As a result, we will be focusing on delivering high quality content delivered by and to change makers, thought leaders and academics. Of course, these categorisations overlap, intersect and merge – and all of them overlap or are linked in one way or another to consumers, trade, media, public and private sectors, and many others.

So, The Ecologist will focus its content and not try to cover every story on the earth – and there are thankfully plenty of platforms like ours who we collaborate with, or who pick up where we leave off – but we also recognise complexity and interconnectedness and our content will reflect this. 

Synthesising wisdom 

We will keep learning about our audiences, our contributors, and the world which we all impact and are impacted by. We will host events that bring together contributors and audiences to nurture fruitful collisions, alchemy, discussion and debate.

We want to live by the ways of being that we are exploring – including networks and ecosystems – and we will absorb and offer thinking that contributes to what it means to be a networked organisation in our current age.

We want The Ecologist to become a network that reaches far and wide, not to simply churn out information to people who are already overwhelmed with it, but instead to play a role in synthesising thinking and ideas.

As biologist EO Wilson says: “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.”

We want to understand and amplify the known and less-well-known voices around the world who can help our global, national, community and individual leadership make those important choices that will impact the world that we live in now, and will leave to the future.

This is where you come in…

We want to grow our network and connect people and ideas, and so we are looking for talented contributors who are interested in writing regularly for The Ecologist, through the lens of one of our three content strands – thought leadership, change makers, or academia. 

These are currently not paid roles, but we will do what we can to get your work and ideas out to a global audience of millions.

We’ll also provide you with one year’s free membership of the Resurgence Trust, which includes a bi-monthly print version of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine – or digital if you prefer. And you’ll be invited to events to meet other ecologists and environmentalists. This is where the alchemy happens!  

If you are interested in becoming a regular volunteer contributor then please email us and we will provide you with further information. You can trial our ‘beta’ form or simply email us.

If you are an academic, contact Catherine Harte at academia [at] theecologist.org. If you are a thought leader, contact Elizabeth Wainwright at thoughtleader [at] theecologist.org. If you are a change maker contact Marianne Brooker at changemaker [at] theecologist.org. If you would like to contact the editor directly, email Brendan Montague at brendan [at] theecologist.org. 

We look forward to you being a part of our unfolding story!

This Author

Elizabeth Wainwright is a contributing editor of The Ecologist working with thought leaders. She is a former editor at the Resurgence & Ecologist magazine. Elizabeth co-leads the community development charity, Arukah Network, and is based in Devon. Twitter: @LizWainwright.

Dozens of people were attempting over the weekend to stop Banks Group from finishing building the access road to its Bradley site near Dipton.

Work on building the road stopped at the site at 8.30pm on Saturday after protesters locked themselves across an area where the company was trying to lay tarmac. Construction is yet to start again.

Simon Daniels, one of the blockading activists, said he planned to stay as long as possible to prevent the operations from going ahead.

New woodland

“I spent four years studying the science behind climate change. Today, I am taking the data to its logical implications. Coal has got to stop. My actions are necessary,” he said.

Banks Group has permission to extract 500,000 tonnes of coal from the site. The activists claim Banks’s planning agreement means it cannot start mining operations on the site until it has completed the access road, and that because the road is not yet finished, planning permission should have expired on Sunday.

The company insists all legal permissions are in place, and that its permission has not expired because it has already formally begun mining operations.

A statement released by the company said: “Around 30 new jobs will be supported at the Bradley site when it is fully operational, along with others in the local supply chain.

Breathable air

“Site operations are scheduled to run for between two and three years, with all on site activity complete in 2021. Restoration will include the creation of new woodland and a nature reserve area, as well as the return of some of the land to agricultural use.”

Previous protests against the mine in April led to arrests after activists tied themselves to trees and hid in underground tunnels.

Suzanne Leigh, a local resident, said: “If Banks think we’re going to leave them be, they can think again. Local people have fought for thirty years to keep this valley green, keep the air breathable, and keep fossil fuels under the ground.

“In that time this country has moved past coal. Coal is our heritage but the valley itself is the asset we value most here.”

This Author

Alexandra Heal is a journalist and MA student at City University, London. She freelances for BBC News and is co-founder of siftguide.com. She tweets at @alexandraheal.

When it comes to the growing ecological crisis on the planet today, major media can do a pretty poor job of covering this subject matter with any constancy or depth.

Even when major news media focuses upon the environment, it tends to run hit pieces on the disappearing glaciers, followed by another piece on the importance of recycling as if the latter will effectively solve the former.

And when the mounting ecological disaster is covered, it is presented as tenuous as the growing fears of economic collapse, each postured as conspiracy theories whose remedy is to just “snap out of it” and be positive!

Amenable species

When we turn towards media focussed on ecology, this news tends to be about emerging theories, how new tech is revolutionising the planet, the industry standards of mattress recycling for hotel beds, or the usual story on roadside pollution. All are important areas of potential change.

However, even the cumulative efforts of all the above would not put a dent in one of the most important ecological issues facing us: the consumption and production of meat.

Meat production is the elephant in the room that not even the largest environmental charities are addressing – but now the U.S. government is.

Earlier this month the US government gave the nod to the ecological disaster at hand when a Congressional subcommittee on government spending voted to advance a bill to the 46-member House Agriculture Committee.

This would authorise the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) to regulate how cell-cultured meat products are labeled and inspected for safety, proposing  to “regulate products made from cells of amenable species of livestock, as defined in the Federal Meat Inspection Act, or poultry, as defined in the Poultry Products Inspection act, grown under controlled conditions for use as human food.” 

Grass-fed beef

Cultured meat proponents claim that this technology would spare animals life, require less energy and land, and emit fewer greenhouse gases than conventional meat production does. While the proposed measure does not go into detail as to the relationship between meat production and its ecological impact, plenty before have.

One of the most important books on this topic without a doubt is Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. 

Pollan examines every aspect of our food system to include the ethics of our current diets based on various primary food sources ranging from the industrial, the organic, to the local, examining the impact of our food system on the body and on the planet leaving no mystery as to how each dinner he describes came into being.

Himself an omnivore, Pollan specifically critiques environmentalists who push meat-eating or who claim that grass-fed animals is a solution to environmental ruin.  It’s not, he maintains, it’s part of the problem. Pollan advocates for a diet that is mostly plant-based and if one does eat meat, then to move away from eating it daily.

On the flip side of Pollan is Nicolette Hahn Niman who argues that grass-fed beef can be made sustainable in Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production. 

Greenhouse emissions

Yet, there are problems with some of her contentions, even if the nutritional value of grass-fed beef is higher than cord-fed beef.

For starters, Niman is able to sell her upscaled beef to the affluent area of Marin County, California, at a price most Californians could simply not afford. So the sustainability of such beef would be for an elite public and would unavoidably end up not being sustainable.

The most debatable point of her book, however, is when Niman makes the argument for grain-fed beef while utterly failing to demonstrate the availability of grazing land to produce enough beef to feed those in just North America. And she fails to demonstrate how this would work. It is physically impossible.

In the Keegan Kuhn’s and Kip Andersen’s film, Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret, we are given information as to the pros and cons of corn-fed and grass-fed beef. 

Many facts are presented, such as how the raising of factory animals creates 18 percent of greenhouse emissions and how livestock and their byproducts account for 51 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Not sustainable

At one point in the film, Andersen visits the Markegard family farm where they specialise in grass-fed beef and he hears their figures for what would work. The film then takes these figures and shows the physical impossibility of having grass-fed beef to feed the world using the Markegard family’s model for farming.

If it takes 4,500 acres of grassland to produce 80,000 pounds of beef with the average American consuming 209 pounds of beef a year, this would mean that 382 people could live from this land (11.7 acres a head).

Take this figure and calculate for 314 million Americans and that comes to 3.7 billion acres of grazing land. However, the continental United States is only 1.9 billion acres and thus, the filmmakers show how there would have to be grasslands extending into Canada, south through Mexico, all of Central America, past Colombia and well into Brazil. 

This land should then be cleared of cities, buildings, and homes with all mountains and forests levelled, all to create grain-growing terrain to feed enough cattle to in turn feed only those in the United States.

Kuhn and Andersen demonstrated that grain-fed beef is simply not sustainable by any measure and point to the larger issues of how the meat lobby has maintained the silence of major NGO’s on this specific issue.

Respecting life

Watching Cowspiracy, it is no wonder that Greenpeace refused to be interviewed while other organisations under investigation – Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, and Rainforest Action Network – were unable to answer the filmmakers’ questions regarding the impact meat production has on the planet which directly affects their NGO’s mandate.

What is evident is that the meat industry is powerful. During the production of this project, one of the film’s backers pulled out, apparently after coming under pressure from someone within the meat industry.

While there are various ways to bring about ecological change that don’t necessarily mean donning Birkenstocks and going vegan, recent literature and films on the subject are strongly advocating that if people cannot become vegan or vegetarian, that at the very least they ought to try eating less meat. 

Or, as the United States will soon find out, cultured meat could also be a happy alternative. 

One thing is certain: it is incumbent upon us to take the necessary steps to do our part in preserving the environment and respecting life as we thus far know it.

This Author

Dr Julian Vigo is a scholar, film-maker and human rights consultant. She is the author of Earthquake in Haiti: The Pornography of Poverty and the Politics of Development (2015).

The world’s largest amphibian – the Chinese giant salamander – is on the brink of extinction due to the demand from the luxury food market, according to a new study.

Andrias davidianus has now all but disappeared from its traditional freshwater habitats, fished to satisfy the growing demand for this highly coveted delicacy. The amphibians, which can grow up to 1.8m long, are routinely harvested from the wild to stock commercial breeding farms.

Chinese giant salamanders belong to an ancient group of salamanders that diverged from their closest relatives over 170 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, and are considered a global conservation priority for maintaining evolutionary history. Now they are classified as critically endangered by the leading global watchdog of nature conservation.

Most extensive wildlife survey

Dr Samuel Turvey, from Zoological Society of London (ZSL) Institute of Zoology, is a co-author of the report published in the journal Current Biology.

He said: “The overexploitation of these incredible animals for human consumption has had a catastrophic effect on their numbers in the wild over an amazingly short time-span. Unless coordinated conservation measures are put in place as a matter of urgency, the future of the world’s largest amphibian is in serious jeopardy.”

The landmark study details how a team of scientists from ZSL, an international conservation charity, working alongside local partners including the Kunming Institute of Zoology (KIZ), conducted the most extensive wildlife survey seen in China to date. 

Field surveys were carried out at 97 sites in 16 of the country’s 23 provinces over a four-year period, providing first-hand evidence of the desperate plight faced by Chinese giant salamanders, which face threats including poaching for growing human demand.

A related study also published in Current Biology reveals that the Chinese giant salamander, previously thought to represent a single species, actually appears to consist of at least five distinct genetic lineages – some of which are now exceedingly rare and possibly already extinct in the wild.

A flagship species

Dr Fang Yan from KIZ, a co-author, said: “Together with addressing wider pressures such as poaching for commercial farms and habitat loss, it’s essential that suitable safeguards are put in place to protect the unique genetic lineage of these amazing animals, which dates back to the time of the dinosaurs.”

Chinese legislation prohibits the harvesting of wild populations of Chinese giant salamander. The country’s Ministry of Agriculture supports widespread releases of farmed animals as a conservation measure.

Paradoxically, this approach may be harmful to wild populations as it risks mixing genetic lineages and spreading wildlife disease. The study’s authors instead call for the establishment of captive populations of genetically distinct lineages for the specific purpose of conservation breeding.

Chinese giant salamanders are a flagship species for China’s freshwater river systems. Efforts to conserve these charismatic amphibians will play a vital role in protecting the region’s habitats and biodiversity, as well as freshwater resources for the people of China.

This Author

Catherine Harte is a contributing editor of The Ecologist. Click here for more information on the work ZSL is doing to conserve amphibians worldwide. 

The campaign against onshore fossil fuel exploration has taken a dark turn, with an attempt by an oil company to stifle peaceful protest. I am one of six women who decided to be named and defend ourselves in the High Court against this attack on human rights.

It’s not just on behalf of ourselves. The injunction by UK Oil and Gas is against “persons unknown”. If we had stood back we would now have an interim injunction banning “lawful activities” which conflicted with UKOG’s commercial interests.

Support their campaign online.

We felt we had no choice. The potential for other companies to use this wide ranging and draconian step was enormous. So we put our names forward and became the Surrey and Sussex six!

Drill on Leith Hill

In fact, many more people came forward initially. The first hearing at the High Court in March was so crowded that extra chairs were brought in.

Bianca Jagger turned up outside the court to talk about the need to defend human rights. UKOG had bitten off more than it could chew. The judge adjourned the case – which was clearly not going to proceed within the couple of hours set aside.

Within days UKOG had amended their injunction to remove the reference to lawful activities. It now seeks to ban promoting or encouraging activities which they are seeking to define as “unlawful”.

These include some commonly used and perfectly legal tools of peaceful protest in the campaign against fracking and other forms of extreme oil and gas extraction. 

None of us chose to take this on. Oil drilling plans arrived on our doorsteps. Europa Oil and Gas has been trying since 2009 to get all its consents to drill on Leith Hill in the Surrey Hills – an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and Green Belt.

Public access

The proposed oil drilling site is accessed by an historic sunken lane which is so narrow that it is difficult for two cars to pass at some points. Europa plans to use the lane to move an oil rig and tonnes of aluminium trackway and to bring out waste including radioactive waste.

The plan was given the green light by the Planning Inspectorate in 2015 after Surrey County Council had turned it down.

There was an heroic fight by the Leith Hill Action Group, which has raised thousands of pounds for legal costs. Now just the traffic management plan and the environmental permits have to be secured.

During that long saga another local group was formed – A Voice for Leith Hill – which aims to give voice to this beautiful area, its trees, the water which feeds the aquifer for Dorking and Leatherhead, the wildlife and tranquillity.

This was designated public access land, until the Forestry Commission leased it off to Europa and put up a fence.

Fracking by another name

A protection camp popped up towards the end of 2016 and has been there ever since. Locals and protectors are now working together to oppose this awful plan.

The drill proposed at Leith Hill – the same used at other sites in Surrey and Sussex – involves horizontal drilling. It isn’t defined as fracking because the water volumes involved are too low. Instead it would use acid to fracture the rock and release the oil. This is tight oil, in rock that has low permeability.

Many involved in the campaign across the Weald have signed up to the Weald Action Group and become experts in acidisation and the environmental impacts of it.

This is fracking by another name, with its own set of impacts falling through a loophole in regulation and good practice. Local communities and the environment are suffering as a result.

When the Environment Agency said it was minded to grant the permit for drilling on Leith Hill over 100,000 people signed a petition about their concerns to their drinking water. Independent hydrogeologists have found the oil company’s claims about risk to be lacking the right analysis. 

Keep fighting

Which brings us back to the injunction. We are standing together across the Weald against the rush for tight oil. UKOG has now bought a 40 percent share in the Leith Hill site. It operates at Horse Hill near Gatwick Airport and Broadford Bridge in West Sussex. 

It is planning to move ahead with plans on the Isle of Wight this year. At Markwells Wood – now not in the injunction – UKOG have been ordered by the South Downs National Park Authority to cap the well and restore the site.  

The injunction seeks to outlaw activities like slow walking and lobbying suppliers to the sites. At the Brockham site near Dorking last year nine people were arrested for slow walking.  Three were prosecuted. One of those arrested but never charged has also stepped up to be a defendant.

Jacqui Hamlin says that when the charges were dropped: “It was a great relief, as the whole thing had been a huge worry, and I felt like a real weight had been taken off my shoulders.

“I was also pleased that it was recognised and accepted that a criminal prosecution for this kind of lawful protest was not necessary and in the public interest”.  

Legal team

After the slow walking at Brockham it was found out that a side track had been drilled without planning permission under the noses of the regulators.

If had not been for local people and protectors at the site, providing evidence and reports to the county council, this might never have been discovered.

It was UKOG’s CEO Stephen Sanderson who said the aim was to build “back to back wells” in “industrial production”. Communities across the South East and those fighting fracking in the North of England do not want that.

Whatever drives us – whether it’s climate activism or fears about drinking water or concerns about HGVs on narrow lanes or unstable geology – we must keep fighting these plans and the unjust injunction that seeks to silence us.

Now we are fundraising. We are protected against UKOG’s costs but need to pay our legal team. Please support us by pledging online. 

This Author

Vicki Elcoate is a member of the Weald Action Group.

Delegates from around the world met in Germany to negotiate what is known as the Paris Rulebook – the set of rules and frameworks that will serve to implement the Paris Agreement – earlier this month.

These negotiations make 2018 a particularly important year: “I have talked about the COP24 as a ‘Paris 2.0’. If we fail to approve the work program of the agreement, the Paris Agreement has no impact,” explains Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the United Nations for Climate Change.

The international community must agree on a long series of climate measures under Paris, such as the implementation and design of carbon markets, the creation of a transparency process, setting up a mechanism to increase climate ambition and – most contentious – a financing mechanism that helps the poorest countries make their transition to sustainable energy and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Climate action

With such a delicate job ahead, NGOs have criticised the fact that actors with interests opposed to climate action can attend and participate in the negotiations. 

“In just seven months, parties aim to lock-in the guidelines to the Paris Agreement,” said Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability. “Turning Paris from just a set of aspirations on paper into actual action.

“If those rules and guidelines continue to be written with big polluters looking over the shoulders of delegates, our chances of achieving Paris’ aspirations could be lost.”

Corporate Accountability is among the NGOs who are denouncing how large oil, gas and coal companies have direct access to climate negotiations thanks to organisations such as the United States Chamber of Commerce or the Business Europe association.

This access leads them to influence decisions, to appear greener as an organisation – also known as ‘Greenwashing’ – or to promote false solutions.

Presence of polluters

At the UN conference earlier this May, a collection of countries representing more than 70 percent of the world’s population have asked the United Nations to adopt a definition and clear regulation of Conflict of Interest (COI).

This would prevent organisations that delay climate action at the national or international level from influencing climate change negotiations.

However, the UN negotiations on this issue were postponed for another year – until June 2019. This is despite the high interest from civil society groups and several country delegations.

The United States and the European Union in particular vetoed any progress on the issue, preventing any progress on an agreement that regulates the presence of polluters in the negotiations.

During the recent climate negotiations, a letter signed by 88 members of the European Parliament from six different parliamentary groups was also presented, requesting a definition and regulation on conflict of interest in the climate negotiations.

Leaders in obstruction

Likewise, European civil society also presented a letter signed by more than 100 organisations, asking Arias Cañete, Commissioner of Energy and Climate and leader of the European delegation in the international negotiations, to support a conflict of interest policy.

“The EU has managed to block policies on conflict of interest and return home and get away with it, not receiving any backlash,” argues Pascoe Sabido of Corporate Europe Observatory.

“Now we see how more groups are paying attention, and no longer accept that the EU, as a climate leader, should be standing in the way of such an important policy as this.”

In addition, these civil society groups presented a report detailing the revolving doors of several European countries, including the UK, between governments and fossil fuel companies. The report, whose authors stress it is not exhaustive, identifies 88 cases of revolving doors across 13 countries.

Max Anderson, a member of the European Parliament, said: “There is a revolving door between politics and the fossil fuel lobby all across Europe. It’s not just a handful of cases – it is systematic.

Private sector

“The fossil industry has an enormous economic interest in delaying climate action and the revolving door between politics and the fossil lobby is a serious cause for alarm.”

The report finds that the UK scores ‘medium’ in the climate performance index, that is, in its efforts for a transition towards an energy efficient and low carbon society.

It also emphasises that fossil fuels are subsidised with more than 7.4 billion euros per year in the UK, and argues the problem of revolving doors is “endemic” to the country.

As many as 60 percent of ministers and public officials who left government took up roles in the private sector in the same sector as their ministry between 2009 and 2015, according to the study.

The UK department with the highest percentage of people taking up private sector employment in the same field as their public service role was the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). DECC became part of Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in July 2016.

Nearly 90 percent of people leaving DECC took up jobs in the energy sector, including six former energy ministers. The study argues that the revolving doors within the fracking industry are particularly worrying, especially in times when no more fossil fuels should be extracted.

Experts argue that we need a policy that regulates revolving doors and conflicts of interest if we want to advance climate policy. On the level of international discussions, however, this has been kicked into the long grass.

This Author:

Anna Pérez Català is an environmental scientist specialised in climate change and development. She has worked for NGOs, governments and organisations on climate and environmental issues. She is the campaign manager for Climate Tracker, an organisation supporting environmental journalists worldwide to bring climate change into their national debates. Anna tweets from @AnnaPerezCatala

When a young postwoman from Wales started a petition calling for manufacturers to stop using plastics in menstrual products, she could have hardly hoped for a better response. Ella Daish’s petition was launched in February and gained more than 100,000 signatures in two months. 

Reusable and biodegradable alternatives have been available for years, but Ella’s success demonstrates that increased awareness of single-use plastic has stimulated much greater public interest. 

This year, the UK’s first washable ‘period underwear’ was launched by the St Albans-based start-up WUKA, and recent industry figures reveal that demand for reusable menstrual cups is at an all-time high.  So, is the tide turning in the battle for greener periods? 

Period plastics

While there are certainly promising signs, achieving a meaningful reduction in plastic menstrual products presents a formidable challenge. Menstrual product sales are worth about £270 million a year in Britain, with the industry dominated by some of the world’s most powerful consumer goods conglomerates.

The average menstruator in the UK will get through around 11,000 pads and tampons in their lifetime. It’s estimated that up to 90 percent of a menstrual pad is plastic.

The majority of the menstrual items we throw away will be incinerated or linger for centuries in landfill. Around 8.5 per cent of sewage debris – which includes menstrual products – will find its way onto Britain’s beaches. These materials can take centuries to break down, threatening the health of marine environments with microplastics. 

Non-organic pads and tampons can also contain chemical absorbers, fillers, lubricants, and chemical and pesticide residues from the bleaching and manufacturing process.

These have the potential to impact our health – vaginal tissue is particularly absorbent – while the residues and leaching of materials and additives are environmental contaminants.

The scandal

The Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) has been concerned about the impact of these products on the environment since 1989 when its founding group of feminist campaigners published ‘The Sanitary Protection Scandal’. 

This report was the first of its kind, and was highly critical of the disposable menstrual product and nappy industries for perpetrating unsafe and unsustainable manufacturing processes. 

Three years of campaigning by WEN resulted in labelling about Toxic Shock Syndrome (TSS) on tampon packaging, followed by a nationwide ‘Bag it and Bin it’ campaign, to stop menstrual waste from being flushed down the loo.   

The campaign is important because awareness of alternatives remains weak. Smaller ethical companies have a fraction of the marketing budget of the consumer goods giants who dominate the industry, which makes it difficult for them to get the word out.

To make things worse, powerful brands like Always and Tampax, owned by Procter & Gamble, are allowed to market their products in schools under the guise of period education but neglect to let young people know about more sustainable options such as washable pads and menstrual cups. 

The taboo around periods also means that even those who are aware of alternative products can be reticent about spreading the word, even among friends and family.

What next

Firstly, major manufacturers need to remove plastics from menstrual products and packaging, and switch to organic and compostable versions to keep plastics and chemicals out of our environment.

We can’t expect everyone to make the move to reusables, and manufacturers have a moral duty to ensure that their products aren’t contaminating our planet for many hundreds of years.

We must also demand a full and balanced education on menstrual product options in schools so that young people can make an informed choice that’s based on their needs and those of the environment rather than what’s best for big business.

As part of the Environmenstrual campaign, we’re launching a pilot programme of workshops in schools and universities and we’re aiming to design a toolkit that can be used by teachers, students, and educators. 

The fact that the cheapest options are those with the most potential to damage our health and the planet makes this a social and environmental justice issue: those with the least power have the greatest exposure to dangerous products. 

Period poverty

According to a survey by Plan International UK, one in ten girls aged 14 to 21 can’t afford menstrual products. While reusable cups and pads will last for years and can offer long-term savings, they require an initial investment, which may put them out of reach of anyone on a low-income.  

Our coalition partners, The Cup Effect and Bloody Good Period, have teamed up to run ‘CupAware’ parties  – like Tuppaware parties! – to demystify menstrual cups and secure donations forasylum seekers and refugees. 

We’ve also begun to explore the potential for a funded voucher scheme for reusables, which could operate in a similar way to the successful Real Nappies for London scheme which WEN set up in 2007. This sees local authorities subsidise washable nappies to the benefit of low income families. 

Learning how to make washable cotton pads can also be a fun and low-cost way of securing reusable menstrual wear. Making subsidised reusables available on every university campus would be another great step forward in the campaign against period poverty. 

With new innovations in the menstrual product market, it’s also important that we offer a critical eye to new products, to help secure the safest options. 

Your support

The movement for sustainable menstrual products is underway, but we need your support. Our Environmenstrual crowdfunder closes on 30th June 2018 and we’d be delighted if you would support this important campaign by making a pledge.

• Support the Environmenstrual campaign crowdfunder
• Find out more about menstrual cups, period underwear, washable pads, reusable tampon applications, compostables, or have a go at making your own 
• Join our coalition 
• Take part in the Environmenstrual Week of Action, 13th-20th October 2018 
• Sign Ella’s plastics petition
• Take part in a beach or rivers clean up
• Check out this video on ‘unflushables’ by Bristol-based campaign group, City to Sea
• Support WEN: become a member and get in touch on Twitter and Instagram

This Author 

Julia Minnear is a Co-Director at Women’s Environmental Network (WEN) – the only UK charity connecting women’s health, equality, and the environment. She also co-ordinates LEEF – London’s professional network for environmental & sustainability educators.