A government-funded scheme providing free fruit and vegetables to all four to six-year olds in the country sounds like a health win. However, research by campaigners at Pesticide Action Network UK (PAN UK) has revealed that the produce supplied may not be as healthy as it seems.

The research analysed the government’s own data from regular testing of fruit and vegetables by the Expert Committee on Pesticide Residues in Food (PRiF). In two thirds of the samples tested, residues of more than one pesticide were detected, with some individual samples containing as many as thirteen different chemicals. 

PAN UK is particularly concerned about this, as it says there has been little research on the combined effect of ingesting multiple pesticides on humans, particularly children, and almost no understanding of the long-term effects on health. Levels of residues are restricted by government, but this only covers pesticides used individually, the organisation said.

Multiple pesticide residues

Children are one of the groups most vulnerable to the impacts of pesticides as their bodies are still forming and pesticide exposure can interfere with the development of particular organs, PAN UK said. In addition, the capacity of children’s bodies to break down toxins is far less developed than that of adults. 

Imazalil, a ‘probable carcinogen’ and developmental toxin, was the most frequently detected pesticide. Second most frequent, and present in a fifth of all samples, was chlorpyrifos, which has been found to have negative impacts on children’s cognitive development. The substance is approved only for extremely limited use in the UK, and from 2018 will be totally banned from 2018. 

The fruit and vegetables given to children through the scheme were found to have higher levels of residues than those available to the public in supermarkets, PAN UK found. Multiple pesticide residues were found in ninety per cent of applies given out in schools, compared with 60 per cent in mainstream apples. 

Protecting children from pesticides

PAN UK wants the government to change its approach, and give schoolchildren organic produce. It estimates that this would cost 1p extra per child per day, totalling £5.6 million on top of the £40 million the scheme currently costs. 

New agricultural policy being drawn up for when the UK leaves the EU could provide an opportunity to move away from pesticides and promote British organic produce, PAN UK said. 

The group says it is very supportive of the principle of giving free fruit and vegetables to children, and does not want parents to stop their children eating it. However, it wants to raise awareness of the information, which is “currently buried in technical reports” on the PRiF’s website, and is encouraging parents and schools to lobby the Department of Health to do more to protect children from pesticides.

“This scheme is for four to six year-olds, we should be giving them the very best,” said Nick Mole, policy officer at PAN UK. “It just shows a lack of concern to do things properly.”

PAN UK says it has tried to get the issue of pesticides on the department’s radar for many years, but it has refused to engage. 

Lord O’Shaughnessy, parliamentary under secretary of state for health, told PAN UK that pesticides “did not fall under the department’s policy area”, when the organisation requested a meeting to discuss their health impacts in July. 

In a statement, the Department of Health said: “The PAN report notes the presence of pesticide residues, but just because a residue is present does not mean that it is harmful to health.”

Legal restrictions on pesticide residue levels are set significantly below a level that could represent a risk to health, and the most sensitive people are taken into consideration when setting them, the department added.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and the former deputy editor of the environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

“The root causes of the crises facing Africa today, like land grabbing and ecosystem degradation, date back to colonialism and the human-centred thinking that sees us as superior and having rights that override those of other beings”, says Dennis Tabaro.

Dennis, an affable former accountant, did not always see things this way.  But over the past three years, he and five other civil society leaders have undergone a transformative training in the philosophy and practice of Earth Jurisprudence that has changed their view.

An eco-centric philosophy of law and governance, Earth Jurisprudence recognises that humans must govern themselves according to the ecological laws and limits of the Earth system, as indigenous peoples have done for millennia.

Blending wilderness experience and written assignments, African and western philosophical and legal traditions, advocacy strategies and practices for reviving indigenous knowledge systems, the three year course Dennis and his fellow participants have undertaken is the first of its kind.

Commended by the UN’s Harmony with Nature Initiative, and developed and led by The Gaia Foundation, the course is helping nurture the African Earth Jurisprudence movement.

Decolonisation

Blessed by Kikuyu, Maasai and Tharakan elders, at the end of July, Africa’s first ever group of Earth Jurisprudence practitioners graduated in a colourful ceremony in the foothills of Mount Kenya.

The graduates are comprised of lawyers, educators, former accountants and civil society leaders from Benin, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Each of them has taken a profound personal journey ‘back to roots’, returning to their rural childhood homes to reconnect with their community lands, elders and a body of traditional knowledge they had left behind.

“We are all born barefoot lawyers for the Earth, but as we grow up we become so consumed by the so-called modern world, by the city, that we easily forget. As Africans many of us are born in communities that are embedded in Nature. This course has helped me to become myself again”, says Fassil Gebeyehu, one of the new graduates from Ethiopia.

This de-colonising process is an integral part of the course. It aims to give practitioners an opportunity to re-appreciate ecological place-based knowledge and spirituality that have been demonised by, amongst others, colonists, missionaries and multinationals.

“People in Africa face many challenges in practicing traditional cultures that protect Nature. They are often accused of witchcraft or rejecting modernity. This is a big challenge. But when we see Nature through the eyes of these traditional cultures, this is what brings us back to life”, says Method Gundidza, another graduate.

Long-held and constantly adapted bodies of African traditional ecological knowledge have been severely undermined. Yet they are a source of identity and strength around which communities can organise in challenging times, says Liz Hosken, The Gaia Foundation’s South African Director and co-facilitator of the course.

“The training for Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners responds to the growing realisation in Africa that the continent has a rich cultural heritage of ecologically rooted traditions. We need to draw on these to forge a viable future and deal with climate change and the scramble for land. Traditional African customary laws and governance systems are founded in Earth Jurisprudence. Africa’s heritage is her future”, says Hosken.

Revival

The newly graduated Earth Jurisprudence practitioners are working with communities in six African nations to revive and enhance their traditional ecological knowledge and governance systems, including agroecological farming practices.

Using and adapting skills developed during the three-year course, Method Gundidza has been accompanying his childhood community of Bikita in Zimbabwe, to revive traditional knowledge and practices for climate-changed times.

Recent years have brought extreme weather to Bikita. Seasons of devastating drought have been swiftly followed by flooding, profoundly affecting farming and the availability of food. According to Method, part of the problem is that people in Bikita had abandoned more resilient, locally-adapted seed varieties, like millet.

“In the past people abandoned millet and the collective millet harvest as they were encouraged by companies and the government to use so-called improved seeds and chemical fertilizers. This made the people vulnerable.  Millet is a very reliable drought crop. If the rains don’t come, then at least the millet will grow and people will have food”, he says.

Through community dialogues, Method has helped bring together elders and youth, men and women, to discuss the problems they are facing and foster solutions rooted in their own knowledge. As a result, the people of Bikita have begun to revive resilient local varieties of seed, including millet, finding that some elders had kept ‘lost’ varieties alive.

“This last growing season the millet was in the fields again. Even when it was very dry and the other fields were brown, the millet was green. The people are also reviving their old millet seed storage system and the community harvest happened again for the first time in many years”, says Method.

Transformation

The Earth Jurisprudence course, and the work of the graduates, is part of a wider global movement seeking to transition humanity from a destructive to a mutually enhancing relationship with the Earth.

Rights of Nature cases, campaigns to recognise ecocide as a crime and indigenous peoples’ struggles to defend their sacred territories are part of a shift underpinned by Earth Jurisprudence understandings.

“Earth Jurisprudence is the philosophy underlying Rights of Nature. Rights of Nature is really just a tool to get us to the end game which is … exercising our duty, our responsibility to live in relationship with the Earth”, explains lawyer and prominent Rights of Nature advocate Linda Sheehan, Director of Planet Pledge.

At pan-African and international levels, Africa’s first Earth Jurisprudence practitioners are advocating for Earth-centred laws and policies that support communities’ ecological governance systems.

Earlier this year, the graduates successfully encouraged the African Commission to pass a radical new resolution calling on all African states to recognise and protect Sacred Natural Sites – places of critical ecological, cultural and spiritual importance for many African communities.

The graduates were also prominent participants in the UN Harmony with Nature Initiative’s 2016 online dialogue on Earth Jurisprudence, which was presented at the UN General Assembly last September.

Building the African Earth Jurisprudence movement, the first group of graduates will now act as mentors to a new group of students embarking on this three-year training for transformation.

This Author

Hannibal Rhoades is Communications and Advocacy Coordinator at The Gaia Foundation, a UK-based organisation working internationally to support indigenous and local communities to revive their knowledge, livelihoods and healthy ecosystems. Hannibal is a contributing writer at Intercontinental Cry and has covered stories of indigenous and local communities working for environmental and social justice for numerous publications.

Thomas Berry, the American cultural historian, priest, poet and “geologian”, had the capacity to pierce through to the essence of the dynamics of our time with fresh ideas and language – from a radical critique of the petroleum era to a profound mystical perspective – with compassion but detachment.

It was while he was writing his last book, The Great Work (published in 1999), that I, together with other colleagues from the Gaia Foundation, had the privilege of participating in many discussions with him about his diagnosis of the need “to transform all modern industrial institutions – economics, education, religion, politics, law and governance – from an anthropocentric preoccupation to an Earth-centred understanding of our role and responsibilities as humans embedded in the larger Earth community”.

Berry, who died in 2009 at the age of 95, emphasised that the most pernicious of these institutions is the modern conception of law, where legislation is used to legitimise destruction. It is for this reason that he promoted the need for a new jurisprudence as a priority, inspired by the Indigenous understanding of law, inherent in the order of life, to be discovered, not made by humans.

A lawful and ordered universe

He insisted that ‘Earth jurisprudence’ was the correct term, as it is the very conception of law that needs to change, and thereby our relationship with Nature. Once we recognise that we are born into a lawful and ordered universe and that our wellbeing is derived from complying with these laws, this understanding should permeate the transformation of all the other modern institutions.

Mama Jacinto, a Kogi Indigenous elder from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, reflects a similar understanding: “Since time immemorial, the sacred territory of the Sierra Nevada has been the foundation of our culture. It contains the laws and the symbols that determine our way of thinking and our identity. We should all comply with these norms and laws to safeguard the universe.

“The role of ancestral custodians of the territory is based on knowledge about everything that lives in our territory. In other words, Nature teaches us how to live in harmony. She is an open book where we learn about her stories and about her past. This is what our children and the children of future generations will learn.

“This same knowledge allows us to remember the role of our ancestors, the real meaning of each individual and our mission as humans, responsible for caring for the planet. All life on our planet is threatened when this sense of responsibility is abandoned.”

This thinking resonates with Indigenous shamans from the Colombian Amazon with whom the Gaia Foundation has also been working in recent years. They are deeply concerned that the dominant industrial growth economy consistently breaks the laws that govern life.

Last throes of monopoly capitalism

“The consequences will be severe,” said shaman Rodrigo from Pia Paraná. “Those who believe that humans are superior and can override Nature’s laws are destabilising Mother Earth, and the consequences will affect everyone. It will lead to sickness and chaos for the Earth, and for all who depend on her, including humans. What we do to the Earth, from whom we are born, we do to ourselves. We are part of the web of life. This is the way things are, whether we see it or not.”

We are now living that time. Things are falling apart dramatically and chaos is growing. As the Earth’s systems unwind – from rapid melting of the Arctic, to extreme droughts and floods as climate becomes more unstable, to ocean acidification and ecological tipping points – we see human societies doing the same.

In the last throes of monopoly capitalism, the super-rich are rampaging the Earth with shameless brutality to extract what they can, destroying greater numbers of human and ecological communities. Social movements are asking, “What now?” as they develop strategies to converge and reach the growing number of disenfranchised citizens.

It is no longer those at the fringes calling for systemic change. However, the question is, what is at the heart of the paradigm shift required of us?

For Gaia, what is required of us now is the transformation from the dominant anthropocentric obsession that underpins this brutality towards life, to an Earth-centred worldview. As Einstein purportedly said, we cannot solve a problem with the same thinking that created it. Whatever we put in place for human justice will come to nothing if there is no justice for the rest of the community of life, increasingly in tatters, on whom we depend to maintain conditions for life as we know it. As Rodrigo pointed out, this is the way things are, whether we see it or not.

Search for knowledgeable elders

The paradox is that it takes time to decolonise our minds and to experience ourselves as participants with the community of life around us, so that our actions are enhancing to all life.

This does not happen through reading the plethora of information out there. It comes through rebuilding our relationship with Nature, so that we experience our reciprocal relationship from within the web of life: the living soils, home to a myriad of creatures that together nurture plant life, so that we mammals can live and the birds and insects can also play their vital roles in weaving the web of life. This requires us to see holistically, to see the dynamic interplay in an interdependent world of relationships.

With the dawn of the new millennium, the Gaia Foundation, inspired particularly by Indigenous people and Thomas Berry, began to develop immersion experiences – such as delving into African Indigenous cosmology and conceptions of law with sangomas (traditional doctors) in Botswana, and setting up learning exchanges to the Colombian Amazon.

We took African civil society leaders to experience how Indigenous communities in the Amazon have revived and enhanced their traditional knowledge, practices and governance systems and developed their own endogenous health and education programmes across their territories. Through this work the Indigenous communities have gained legal recognition as the custodians of their ancestral territories, safeguarding 26 million hectares of tropical rainforest.

Motivated, the African leaders returned to their various countries to search for knowledgeable elders as the Amazonians had advised. They initiated community dialogues to recall the memory of their traditions with the elders – the indigenous seeds, medicines, sacred natural sites, the seasonal calendar and rituals and the customary laws that had been in place prior to colonisation.

Sacred natural sites

They found, as in the Amazon, that the elders had lost confidence, having been told that they were illiterate and uneducated, that their traditions were backward, and that their recognition of ancestors and sacred sites was devil worship. It took time for the elders and their communities to rebuild their confidence, to revive their memory and to restore their knowledge and practices.

Through this process, a number of African civil society leaders began a journey of learning with their elders about their roots and the holistic worldview of their traditions. They were excited to see that what they had experienced in the Amazon was echoed in Africa.

For example, their elders explained that customary laws are derived from the laws of the land and understood to be essential for the human community to govern themselves such that they maintain their harmony with the wider community of life.

There are three interconnected dimensions that are imbued with consciousness, they say: the human world, the world of Nature and the world of spirit and ancestors. The role of sacred natural site custodians is to communicate with Nature and the spiritual world, to guide the human community to sustain the balance between these dimensions.

Since 2012, a number of precedents have been realised through this work with communities in various countries. For example, in Ethiopia sacred natural sites and custodial governance systems have been restored and recognised by local government; in Benin the first national law recognising sacred forests has been established; in South Africa clans have developed their own constitutions and documented the customary laws to assert their practices; and similar work is taking place in Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ghana.

Complying with the laws of Nature

As the path of reviving Indigenous knowledge and practices has gained momentum and begun to spread across the African continent, so those working with communities have identified the need for a more in-depth study of Earth jurisprudence and the Amazonian methodology.

The Gaia Foundation agreed to pioneer a three-year training course for ‘barefoot’ Earth jurisprudence practitioners, alongside induction trainings for more communities and coalitions to respond to the growing interest.

Berry identified two sources of inspiration for Earth jurisprudence: Nature herself as the primary text, and Indigenous traditions that derive their customary laws and governance systems from observing the laws of Nature.

The training for practitioners involves four interrelated aspects. Personal practice is at the core, developing our relationship with Nature, learning from elders and complying with the laws of Nature in the way we live our lives.

Another aspect includes understanding the philosophical underpinnings of Earth jurisprudence, holistic science, Indigenous knowledge systems, the dominant industrial growth economy, the growing alternatives, and how systems change.

Promote harmony with Nature

Thirdly, exploring the guiding principles of the Amazonian methodology for reviving and enhancing Indigenous traditions. And finally, developing participatory learning processes for communities and civil society and associated facilitation skills.

Drawing on the work over the years, the Gaia Foundation, together with our African partners and sacred site custodians, has called on the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to recognise sacred natural sites and territories and their customary governance systems and assert that these ancestral lands should be safeguarded from any industrial activity. A resolution will be voted on later this year.

Last year, at the world’s largest environmental gathering, the IUCN World Conservation Congress, we presented a similar resolution, which finally received overwhelming support from government and civil society for recognising that all protected areas and Indigenous sacred natural sites and territories should be no-go areas for mining and other destructive industrial activities.

Also in 2016, there was an unprecedented global discussion on Earth jurisprudence, as part of the UN General Assembly’s commitment to promote harmony with Nature. A report on the dialogue emphasises the crucial importance of going beyond anthropocentrism to establish an Earth-centred relationship with our planet.

This Earth-centred worldview should underpin the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, says the report. It recognises the Gaia Foundation’s work to build the alternatives to our current paradigm, including “the training of Earth jurisprudence facilitators…and the growing African Earth jurisprudence network”.

This year the first three-year training in Earth jurisprudence will be completed, with practitioners gradu­ating and the second course beginning. Practitioners have become passionate advocates: one says, “This training awakens a profound sense of belonging to an animate orderly universe. When you see the world in this way, you cannot stop yourself from enthusing others. It becomes a way of life, a calling at this time of chaos and confusion. And more people are ready for this message as things fall apart.”

This Author

Liz Hosken is founder and director of the Gaia Foundation. This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist, September/October 2017. www.resurgence.org.

So Game of Thrones Season 7 is for many viewers fading into memory and now the long wait for the final instalment begins, a wait that may last until 2019.  Already at The Ecologist we’ve examined how one subtle metaphor has slowly become more “Stark” in the hit HBO adaptation of the fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin.

The parallels between the coming ‘winter’ in Westeros posed by the undead hordes of the White Walkers and our own climate threat has broken into the real world with one of the show’s lead actors making a direct plea for action to address climate change.

Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, aka Jaime Lannister, the knight with the chiselled jawline, has written an article for CNN.com calling for action to reduce emissions and promote renewable energy.

Devastating effects

Writing of the huge wall of ice which features regularly in the TV show he said: “I know all too well that, were Game of Thrones a nonfiction world, that wall of ice would be seriously imperilled by climate change. I know this because my second home is in the similarly ice-rich territory of Greenland.

“My wife is from Uummannaq in the northwest of Greenland, and my two daughters are half Greenlandic. In the considerable time I have spent there, I have seen first hand the devastating effects of rising temperatures on the delicate ecosystem of the world’s largest island.”

He admitted that the fate of Greenland is not normally of concern to most Americans but went on to warn that it should be. “If the Greenland ice sheet – which covers 80 per cent of Greenland – melts, the results for the rest of the planet will be monumental. And not in a good way.

“Experts predict that, if the Greenland ice sheet does indeed melt, sea levels would rise 20 feet. The risks of climate change do not end at simply rising sea levels, which alone should be of concern to residents of New York, Miami, New Orleans and scores of other major metropolitan areas in the United States.”

Coster-Waldau travelled to the melting ice sheet of Greenland earlier this year and has been made a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations Development Programme. His article coincides with a meeting in his Danish homeland of UNLEASH Lab, a gathering of more than a thousand millennial thought leaders from 129 countries, aiming to help the world deliver the Sustainable Development Goals.

An enemy they don’t believe in

It’s certainly welcome to have the issue of climate change being raised by well-known faces that offer more public communication cut-through than your average atmospheric scientist (no offence to any atmospheric scientists reading. Keep up the great work).

Maybe Coster-Waldau will become the small screen equivalent of Australian rugby international David Pocock who has long used his celebrity to make the case for climate action. In 2015 Pocock was arrested for chaining himself to mining equipment at a coal mine in New South Wales.

The climate change metaphor shows no sign of slowing down. The exchange between Jon Snow and Daenerys Targaryen which inspired our original article left Snow frustrated that he had been unable to convince Targaryen of the impending danger. “How do I convince people who don’t know me that an enemy they don’t believe in is coming to kill them all” he asks Tyrion Lannister.

In this season’s penultimate episode, Targaryen ends up flying her dragons north of the wall to rescue Snow, who is surrounded by the White Walker’s zombie horde.

Like Coster-Waldau witnessing first hand the melting Greenland ice sheets, the formerly sceptical Targaryen is convinced of the urgent danger. She concludes the episode saying: “If we hadn’t gone I wouldn’t have seen. You have to see it to know. Now I know.”

This Author 

Joe Ware is a journalist and writer at Christian Aid and a New Voices contributor for The Ecologist. Follow him on twitter @wareisjoe.

We knew this was coming. This August the rains have come with a vengeance. But we knew something like this was coming. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its summary of the expected impacts of climate change. In dry, academic language, the report sets out the evidence: climate change will bring extremes of precipitation: more droughts and more deadly floods. 

Early in the morning on 14 August, heavy rains in Freetown, Sierra Leone triggered a mudslide. Muddy rubble cascaded down the hillside, destroying homes and burying people inside them. The official death toll from this tragedy has now risen to over a thousand.

At the same time, monsoon rains were causing deaths in India and Nepal. In Himachal, two buses with their passengers were swept into a gorge in a landslide. Fatalities from flooding are not uncommon in the summer monsoon season, but this time the heavy rains just kept coming, leading to extraordinary flooding in Nepal, northwestern Indian states and downstream Bangladesh, where the floods submerged over a third of the country.

A storm was brewing

By 24 August, official estimates were 41 million affected across the three nations of India, Nepal and Bangladesh and at least 900 killed. The next day the reported death toll had risen to 1200. And yet this catastrophe was barely reported in the western media.

Meanwhile, a storm was brewing off the southeastern US coast. Having been downgraded to a tropical wave, Harvey picked up energy again and regained hurricane status as it moved across the abnormally warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. It also picked up unusual amounts of moisture. As it hit Houston and surrounding areas of Texas, there was no lack of media attention this time. 

Experts had warned that Houston was particularly vulnerable to flooding in a warming climate because of several factors. In a low lying plain, with poor draining clay soils, and with the expanding city laying down ever more concrete, the water management plan is in no way fit for increasing storm risks. But this was a storm that would overwhelm even the most well-prepared city. 

In the first 72 hours over a metre of rain fell in some areas. Dramatic photographs showed freeways turned into deep rivers, while stranded families sent out desperate pleas for rescue on social media.

Just days earlier, Donald Trump had signed an order scrapping stricter rules around flood risk for federal investment in infrastructure. As Harvey’s rains fell, Trump’s top official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, dismissed the subject of linking the storm to climate change. When asked in an interview, Pruitt described those discussing cause and effect as ‘opportunistic’.

Heavy load

So there may be no immediate impetus from disaster to climate action. The media plays an important role here. There are three ways that media can let us down in reporting climate change-influenced disasters. 

The first is when the media give prominence to events which are easy to report, rather than those which are truly significant. Harvey is a significant story deserving major coverage. Yet before Harvey hit Texas (and hit the headlines), where were the reports on the South Asian flooding? 

Even given the general tendency to treat the deaths of poor people in non-western countries as non-newsworthy, the death toll was then climbing towards a thousand and 41 million affected across three countries. But someone actively following the news could easily be completely unaware of these floods. The story was given cursory coverage then dropped completely out of the news for at least five days, to be picked up again on 29 August, this time more widely.

The second weakness is a failure to be upfront about the links between these disasters and climate change. In the case of Harvey, there are at least three links. One of the most significant is that the warmer than normal waters in the Gulf of Mexico contributed to Harvey’s heavy load of atmospheric moisture. 

In the first five days, it dumped some 20 trillion gallons of water on Texas (one sixth the volume of Lake Erie). Warm waters also give hurricanes more energy. Another factor is that storm surge along the coast rides on top of raised sea levels. These are particularly significant on the Gulf Coast of Texas – sea levels there have risen over 30cm in 50 years. 

Still devastated

One difficulty journalists have in reporting climate change is sustaining interest in a vast slow-motion catastrophe that plays out over a timescale of decades or more. But right now the drama and tragedy is immediate, and there is no excuse for not being clear about what is at stake and the choices we are making.

The final way the media can fail in their coverage is not to stick around. Flood waters make for dramatic photography. But what comes next can be just as devastating. With a lack of clean water, the displaced people of Bangladesh, especially the children, are at risk of deadly diseases such as cholera. 

Many victims of the floods have lost all their possessions. Bangladesh was already experiencing food supply problems after flash flooding wiped out a large part of the rice crop in April. Now more vast areas of crops have been washed away.

And although the US is a rich country, even there, for those who have least, it is hardest to get it back. A year ago, Baton Rouge, Louisiana was hit by one of the worst floods in US history. One year on, poorer neighbourhoods are still devastated. For them, and for the people of Bangladesh, climate change is already here. Will we pay attention?

This Author

Claire James is the campaigns coordinator for the Campaign against Climate Change. She tweets at @campaigncc. 

Managers of supermarkets and garden centres might be surprised to see stocks of the weedkiller Roundup vanishing from their shelves next week. The reason will become clear when customers put them on the spot as to why they are stocking the controversial product.

This is the plan for Christie’s national day of action on 6 September. Christie’s 20 years of campaigning have seen him dressed as vegetables, heckling prime ministers and arrested and charged with criminal damage. He has rallied against the slaughter of animals during the Foot and Mouth crisis, the use of genetically modified seeds and the Iraq war. But, he claims that support for his anti-Roundup campaign has been overwhelming and more than he has previously experienced. 

Christie will be leading the charge in his local town of Barnstaple, where he plans to stage a protest in every supermarket. The use of the herbicide leaves Christie “quivering with anger”, he said. “It’s believed to be a carcinogen, it needs to be exposed. Roundup is a horrendous substance, there is so much evidence out there on its impact on human health. It feels like the right time to do this.

Beautiful planet

“Let’s roundup the Roundup and banish it – and the companies who make it – from our beautiful planet once and for all,” he told The Ecologist.

The controversial weedkiller is in the spotlight again as a crucial decision on its future in Europe is set to be made in the autumn. The European Commission is considering whether to extend the substance’s licence. It was originally due to make a decision last year, but instead granted a temporary extension days before the licence expired. 

In May, EU health commissioner Vytenis Andriukaitis proposed a ten-year extension to the approval of the herbicide, originally patented by Monsanto for Roundup but now manufactured by some 20 companies.

Significant pressure has been building up on both sides of the argument ahead of the licence renewal deadline of 15 December. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a research body of the World Health Organisation (WHO), in 2015 classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. 

Several local authorities in the UK, including Brighton and Hove, Frome and Edinburgh have already banned the use of glyphosate in public spaces. This is in line with a global trend, with restrictions on glyphosate introduced in ten countries in Europe, eight out of ten Canadian provinces, multiple US states and cities, Sri Lanka and Colombia, according to Pesticide Action Network UK.

Permaculture garden

A petition calling for glyphosate to be banned across the EUhas gained support from more than 1,300,000 European citizens, meaning that the European Commission must formally respond. 

However, the European Chemicals Agency, which was asked by the commission to investigate the safety of glyphosate, cleared the substance of having direct links to cancer. 

A spokesman for Monsanto, the largest manufacturer of Roundup, said that when glyphosate had been reviewed by regulators including the European Food Safety Authority and the US Environmental Protection Agency, they had found it to be non-carcinogenic. A joint report by the World Health Organisation and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation upheld these conclusions, he added.

Christie, who comes from a farming background and established one of the country’s oldest permaculture gardens on his estate 20 years ago, alleges that research carried out by regulators is “absolutely not independent at all.” 

“The criteria to work for regulators is to be pro-big business,” he said. “But I really think they’re fighting a losing battle now. I’ve been demanding long-term independent research but I don’t think that is going to happen because they [the manufacturers] know their stuff is toxic.”

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and the former deputy editor of the environmentalist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.