This year’s SEED Awards were announced on the occasion of the SEED Malawi National Dialogue Forum in Lilongwe.
The awards recognise fourteen innovative start-up enterprises from Africa and Asia active in sustainable agriculture and aquaculture, waste, renewable energy, water and sanitation, sustainable tourism, biodiversity and conservation.
SEED Award winners are exceptional and inspiring examples of partnership-based, locally-driven enterprises that contribute to fighting poverty and tackling climate change in their communities and countries.
Innovative potential
Take Nelplast, a Ghanaian enterprise which turns plastic waste into pavement slabs and tiles that are 800 percent stronger than ordinary pavement blocks. This enterprise, which works mainly with youth and women, has collected and recycled over two tons of plastic every day, preventing this waste from ending up in landfills.
Kukula Solar from Malawi has set itself the goal of ensuring that one million low-income women and their families have access to quality, affordable and warranted solar products by 2030.
Indonesian enterprise Mycotech creates leather-like material and products from fungus. Its 100 percent vegan and zero waste philosophy is an example to the fashion industry, which is one of the most polluting in the world.
Ms Svenja Schulze, German Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU), one of the main supporters of the Awards, highlighted the importance of these enterprises in advancing the SDGs: “To achieve the SDGs, everyone needs to contribute. This award highlights the innovative potential of small green and social enterprises and showcases the economic and social opportunities for often marginalized communities. It serves as a great motivation for others to follow.”
Systemic change
Head of Unit at the Flanders Department of Foreign Affairs, Delphine Delouvroy, said: “Flanders believes multi-actor partnerships are crucial to support the necessary systemic change to deliver on the SDGs. In addition to partnerships, innovation and new ways of thinking that question traditional models are essential elements of the transition.
“By supporting the SEED program Flanders wants to support innovative entrepreneurs. The program contributes to the Flemish climate finance engagements, as Flemish support for (eco-inclusive) SMME-development in Southern Africa.”
This year’s winners were selected from over 900 applicants from Ghana, India, Indonesia, Malawi, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Youth-led enterprises led the way, comprising 62 percent of overall applications and 48 percent of the applications were from female-led enterprises.
UNDP Administrator, Achim Steiner, said: “The winners of the SEED Awards are unique in that they deliver grassroots products and services which benefit not only the environment but also local economies and particular groups such as women and youth.
“As such, they are contributing to the resilience of communities, a fundamental shift towards a more inclusive green economy and broader efforts to achieve the SDGs.”
Refined process
As well as being awarded matching grants, winning and finalist enterprises will also receive tailored one-on-one advisory services for several months to validate and grow their operations.
The SEED winners will join the SEED Accelerator programme to refine their financial and business models with a view to scaling up and replicating their activities.
In line with this principle, 52 finalists will be supported through the SEED Catalyser programme, to refine their business models and optimise their impacts while advancing their investment readiness.
The winners will join a network of more than 240 enterprises from 38 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America – laureates of the SEED Awards.
SEED Executive Director, Lewis Akenji highlighted the importance of the awards: “The SEED Awards have a refined process of working with partners to identify future-oriented solutions. Winning enterprises are sure to impact their communities with solutions that can be adapted in other locations and scaled to contribute to address global issues.
“We encourage entrepreneurs, development partners, policy makers and implementers to take a closer look at these eco-inclusive businesses and draw from them to amplify their impacts.”
This Article
This article is based on a press release from the GSCC.
Radical action on climate change is at last on the agenda. The emphasis is on urgency and action and – for XR notably – ‘truth.’ Questions of long-term strategy are less clear, but strategy platforms have been advanced. Foremost among them are the Green New Deal (GND) and degrowth.
An edited version of this essay appears in the latest issue of Resurgence & Ecologist magazine.
GND began as a slogan but has taken shape as policy programmes, advanced by the left of the US Democrats, by a coalition of left parties in Europe, and by Britain’s Labour Party.
Degrowth, likewise, works as a mobilising slogan. It connects networks of activists. It draws on traditions of anarchist and socialist utopian community (or ‘phalanstery’) building. Its foremost agents are the squatters and agro-ecologists, “the nowtopians and eco-communities, … the back-to-the-landers who work the land, or the city dwellers cultivating urban gardens or occupying the squares.”
Ideas
Both groups inhabit large tents. Degrowth encompasses eco-liberals (say, Ramachandra Guha) at one corner, Marxists (Kate Soper, David Harvey) at another, left Malthusians at a third, and socialist feminists (Mary Mellor) too, as well as autonomists and anarchists galore and motley tendencies that defy definition— such as Stephen Quilley’s eco-libertarian-reactionary-communitarian paganism.
Where do we grow from here?
The GND marquee stretches from Thomas Friedman (who coined ‘Green New Deal’) and Joe Biden through Marianne Williamson and Mariana Mazzucato all the way to Thea Riofrancos and Tithi Bhattacharya on the far left.
In each case, despite the canvas being multi-tendency and cavernous, there’s a dominant political complexion. For the degrowthers: narodism. For the GND: social democracy.
By narodism I refer to the nineteenth-century peasant-oriented movement based in sections of the Russian intelligentsia which later, following years of dialogue with Marxists and the adoption of some of their ideas, re-emerged as a mass party, the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs). Russia’s revolutionary Marxists learned much from the SRs and were at crucial junctures closer to them than to the social democrats—despite the Marx-influenced philosophy of the latter.
Inspirational
By social democracy I mean a cross-class political alliance rooted in organised labour. The support base is working-class but the programmes are designed and presented by middle-class strata (e.g. trade union officials) and elites (e.g. parliamentarians). It grows from labour struggles but its representatives advance policies and strategies that reflect their privileged social positions, and, unless pushed forcefully from below, accommodate to the established power structures.
At one end of the GND spectrum, fractions of capital that scent profitable eco-opportunities look to programmes of state-led and state-subsidised infrastructure projects—an early example was the ‘Green Growth’ plan of Lee Myung-Bak in South Korea. For liberal elites, it represents a proposal to save capitalism from itself, for which a modicum of pressure from below may be required.
At the other end, for the far left, it represents an historic opportunity to wrest reforms from capitalism until the ensuing contradictions reveal spaces ‘beyond.’ The goal is a far-reaching and radical transformation of society. The method will be the building of a ‘movement of movements’ that knits workers’ demands for ‘green jobs’ and ‘pink jobs’ together with climate justice activism, and feminist, anti-racist, indigenous and pro-migrant campaigns.
In the zone between is social democracy. Organised labour and its allies demand state backing for green jobs programmes, as steps toward a ‘just transition.’ Social democrats are drawn both ways—excoriating capitalism one day, saluting the flag the next.
A case in point is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (pictured): the most inspirational and brilliant propagandist for a GND, a beacon for the US and global left, who however voted to gift $1,480,000,000,000 to the Pentagon, the most powerful and murderous of US institutions and the world’s biggest polluter.
Minerals from sunlight
In recent times we’ve seen a spiky back-and-forth between ‘eco-modernist’ supporters of a Green New Deal and advocates of degrowth (hereafter, ‘degrowthers’). Matt Huber, a Syracuse geographer, castigates degrowthers for advocating a politics of less. In their focus on the prefix ‘de-’ and ‘reductions,’ they have “little capacity to speak to the needs of the vast majority of workers ravaged by neoliberal austerity.” Further, they recoil from “any hint of industrial technology (or what they pejoratively call a ‘techno-fix’).”
Leigh Phillips, an anti-environmentalist campaigner and contributor to Spiked, presses the same buttons ad absurdum. Degrowth and austerity “are mathematically and socially identical. They are the same thing.”
Against austerity-degrowth, he intones the mantra of modernity. “Energy is freedom! Growth is freedom!” A revival of “Prometheanism” is the order of the day, defined (idiosyncratically) as “the idea that there are no limits other than the laws of physics to how we can re-engineer ourselves and the world around us.”
Central to the programme is technology, regarded as if shorn of its socio-political integument. We should “weep hot tears of pride” at the technological miracles that capitalism has enabled, exemplified by the moonshot. Without reflection on its thoroughly militarist origins, purposes and personnel, Phillips celebrates it as “the best that our species can do.” As for today, to counter climate change a massive worldwide build out of nuclear power is required.
Pollutive
In response, degrowthers diagnose Huber, Phillips and their ilk as suffering from a characteristically capitalist affliction: technological hubris. Lacking a comprehension of economic-ecological constraints (other than the laws of physics) they cannot take full measure of the crisis. Nor do they reflect seriously on the inadequacies and blowback potential of their preferred techno-fixes.
Phillips’ claim that nuclear power emits no carbon dioxide and is the safest of all energy sources is beyond risible. This conveniently forgets that mining and refining uranium ore and manufacturing reactor fuel require enormous energy inputs. And it is belied by the many tens of thousands of deaths due to Chernobyl alone, and the problem of waste.
Scientists are still stumped by the problem of warning the creatures approaching waste dumps a hundred thousand years from now. One biologist and semiotician team has developed the “ray cat solution”—cats genetically altered to glow when radiation is present. Why they predict that future earthlings will flee the luminous pussycats rather than, say, construct a religion around them is unclear.
Pace Huber, degrowthers do not “recoil” from technology or industry. Most of them recognise that phalanstery formation is no panacea, but one element within a comprehensive world-systemic revolution of relations of production and consumption and of society’s relations to nature.
One systematic survey of degrowth literature notes that a common thread “acknowledges the virtues of technology,” and here the kinship to GND programmes is apparent. Many degrowthers fight for wind farms, with their mega-tonnes of reinforced concrete and steel towers, magnetic direct drive turbines, and nano-engineered polymers and composites.
War
Troy Vettese is by no means the only degrowther to advocate free public transport to entice people out of cars and planes, and ‘passive’ houses for all—both of which require colossal construction programmes.
Or listen to Burton’s call for “a major transformation on the kind of scale of the Marshall Plan,” with its requirement of stupendous investments in “the decarbonisation of the power grid, the conversion of transport, heating and manufacture to electric power, and massive increases in energy efficiency.”
Jason Hickel, similarly, aligns himself with GNDs on at least one central point: public investment must urgently be targeted to churning out solar panels, wind turbines and batteries “at a historically unprecedented rate, reminiscent of the industrial retooling that enabled the allies to win the second world war.”
Revolutionary austerity?
On austerity, however, the picture is less clear. Certainly, Phillips’ barbs miss their target, reliant as they are on crude misrepresentation. His antagonists are clear that degrowth is not identical to austerity programmes, “mathematically” or otherwise.
One is a strategy to restore rates of capital accumulation and defend the enrichment of the upper classes through slashing services and welfare spending on which workers and the poor depend. The other is a strategy that erodes the power of capital by relieving the rich of their fortunes and prioritising the welfare of the poor.
Huber’s charges are hardly more convincing, and degrowther Giorgos Kallis, in a brilliant rejoinder, makes short work of most of them. However, there is in Kallis’ writings some ambiguity on austerity.
We know he does not subscribe to austerity politics. He is for debt forgiveness and the creation of “debt-free public money,” and against the imposition of creditor power. Yet he takes as his guide the Italian Communist Party (PCI) leader Enrico Berlinguer’s advocacy of “revolutionary austerity.”
This, in Kallis’ gloss, “is the sort of personal austerity that real revolutionaries of all times have practiced in their personal lives.”
Excess
Defending revolutionary austerity, he adds, “does not make one accomplice to Thatcherite austerity. On the contrary, what is Thatcherite is the liberal assumption of a God-given right of each and everyone to mobilize all resources possible in their pursuit of their individual (or collective) goals.
According to this ingrained liberal view, we cannot tell people that we could perhaps live better with less, because it is people’s god-given right to want more and more, as much as those richer have. What is more revolutionary instead than Gandhi’s plea to ‘live simply so that others may simply live’?”
Two elements of this deserve scrutiny. One is the Gandhian injunction. In affirming the centrality of individual consumption choices, Kallis is himself rehearsing an “ingrained liberal view”: consumer demand is the motivating force that drives and shapes economic life. This is a myth. It obscures the power structures of capitalist society—and this occlusion is one reason why Gandhi received backing from India’s industrial tycoons.
The other is Berlinguer’s austerity agenda. It was not the austerity of today, i.e. the commitment of governments, typically citing the Smithian notion that thrift is the engine of growth, to slash spending on the services that working people require, plunging them into destitution while the well-heeled stroll on unperturbed.
Rather, his call for degrowth emphasised ending “excess” in the Global North to aid the South; it carried hints of Rousseau’s position in the querelle du luxe, and of cultures of communist asceticism at times of struggle and war.
Beef
In a 1977 pamphlet entitled ‘Austerity, An Opportunity to Transform Italy,’ Berlinguer assured the “old dominant groups” that the PCI would agree to “sacrifices by the workers” but only if the “social system as it stands, with its economic structures and basic ideas” were simultaneously transformed.
Yet his PCI was at the time committed to a ‘historic compromise’ with those same elites. The premise was that radical change inflames the dominant groups. Leftists should tamp down social struggles at the very moment when they carry their greatest potential, and instead construct alliances with the parties of army, business and church. In this context, Berlinguer’s call for degrowth as a route to system change was incoherent.
The reluctance to challenge dominant elites is a critical failing in Berlinguer-style degrowth. An ethical critique of growth is vacuous if your party is concurrently stabilising the capitalist order, with its systemic drive to rapacious accumulation. It fails to connect with the experiences of those whom capitalist states, businesses and landlords have robbed: of their land, labour, social housing and so on.
Opposition to luxury and ‘excess’ in the abstract, and a prospectus of universalfrugality, is conciliatory to those kleptocratic elites unless they’re knitted to programmes to overturn the foundations of social injustice by eliminating absolute and relative poverty, and turning private productive and landed property over to the commons. (‘Expropriation’ in the old parlance.) These egalitarian goals are perfectly compatible with degrowth. There’d be a smaller overall materials/energy envelope, with differentiated contents.
For the rich, much much less, while for the billions who lack the basics: more good food, better housing, abundant clean water, efficientsanitation, excellent public transport, quality public amenities available freely to all. For the Global North: drastically reduced consumption of beef, SUVs, aviation, but better public transport, insulated homes, cleaner air, more self-governed time, less hierarchy.
Environmentalism of the poor
Mainstream advocates of GND and degrowth alike seek coalition with sections of the capitalist classes—big business for the GND, SMEs for degrowthers.
But on the far left of each movement the perspective is of fanning the flames of popular movements to the point where they besiege and begin to overcome the institutions of corporate and state power.
The strategic perspective of GND leftists is to build capacity among workers’ and other social movements to push for immediate reform programmes, with an orientation toward socialist goals in the longer run.
What of the degrowth narodniki? By and large, they will join campaigns for unionised ‘green jobs,’ but what ‘just transition’ programmes would they discuss with, say, the Kentucky miners who are blocking coal trains to demand back pay?
At first sight, that conversation may not seem promising. From the phalanstery window, workers’ housing and jobs do not loom large. The degrowthers’ strategy, laments Stefania Barca, has not gained traction among “the impoverished and precarized working classes of the austerity era, nor does it seem capable of having a constructive dialogue with the labour movement in general.”
Self-organisation
Yet there are three resources on the left of the degrowth movement that enable constructive engagement. One is the commitment to powerful unions, seen—rightly—as vital allies in the struggle for reductions in the working week and for improved public services and affordable housing.
The second is the commitment to the self-organisation of groups suffering poverty and oppression. This is a mainstay of authors in the degrowth canon. One such is Guha, notably his work on the Chipko movement, which saw peasants in Uttarakhand ‘hugging’ trees’ to prevent commercial logging.
Guha broadens the lens from India to other countries—Malaysia, Kenya, Brazil—to argue that environmentalism of peasants, pastoralists and indigenous peoples is entwined with agendas of social justice, of local rights to resources, to survival and livelihood. Another is Joan Martinez-Alier.
His The Environmentalism of the Poor finds transformative potential in groups in the Global South, such as the Ogoni and the Ijaw of the Niger Delta, who defend themselves against extractivist corporations and compliant states, and in the process learn to link local grievances to international environmental politics, connecting with campaigning groups elsewhere to press for indigenous rights at the local scale as well as national and international reform.
How these commitments to defending peasant and pastoralist control over the immediate means of livelihood and the rural ‘commons’ can translate to urban settings, and beyond to questions of national and global infrastructure (including Amazon, Google, etc.), all on the basis of self-organisation, is a question that will face our narodniki if they upscale to SRs.
Refugees
The third is anti-capitalism, where capitalism is understood, with input from feminist theory, as a system that loots and plunders across all socio-natural fronts. It degrades the environment, uproots communities and dispossesses people of their means of reproduction and subsistence, threatening livelihoods.
It requires continuous expansion, and irreversibly damages the climate. It rests on the exploitation of wage labour and on uncompensated care-work performed mostly by women. It displaces costs in racialised ways and enforces a racialised economic hierarchy of core and peripheral nations. It imperils the earth, but workers and the poor—foremost women and racialised groups—are first in the firing line, least responsible, and possessed of immense latent power.
From this diagnosis flows the aspiration to what degrowther Bengi Akbulut and colleagues call a “reproductive economy of care, understood not only as caring between humans but also between humans and the non-human environment.”
It is an ethic that builds on the experiences, in daily life and struggle, of exploited and oppressed groups. Whether in the sphere of production or reproduction, struggles strengthen ethics of care and solidarity, and as they broaden, the compass of care/solidarity expands. Environmental crisis demands the extension of such an ethic to the natural world, to climate refugees, against militarism, and so forth.
Venality
Degrowthers therefore seek to build coalitions with “women, peasants, artisans, workers and indigenous people,” groups who “are typically engaged in struggles against the negative impacts of capitalist growth on their living conditions.”
As Martinez-Alier has discussed, opposition to such projects as commercial plantations, mineral extraction, and big dams, is “as much a defence of livelihood as an ‘environmental’ movement in the narrow sense of the term.”
Degrowthers, Barca observes, share with socialists the belief that a strong labour movement is capable of leading a concerted bid for system change, an ecological revolution, so long as a convergence can be achieved between red and green movements “on the terrain of a politics of livelihood.”
That requires a coalition of the labour movement and anti-racist, feminist, social justice and environmental justice movements in a “movement of movements, or an alliance of the dispossessed.” The defence of ‘life’ against capital offers a lattice on which a radical, working-class environmentalism could grow, nourished by the aforementioned ethic of care, and anger at injustice: at the theft of surplus value, the dismantling of welfare, and the venality and recklessness with which those in power have handled this our planet.
Convergence at the left
The three principles just listed bear a distinct resemblance to those that guide socialist theorists of GND. I have in mind Alyssa Battistoni’s vision of a climate-stabilising socialism “oriented toward sustaining and improving human life as well as the lives of other species,” with an emphasis on green- and pink-collar labour such as “teaching, gardening, cooking, and nursing: work that makes people’s lives better without consuming vast amounts of resources, generating significant carbon emissions, or producing huge amounts of stuff.”
I’m thinking, too, of Tithi Bhattacharya’s reflections on ‘Three Ways a Green New Deal Can Promote Life Over Capital,’ with its call for “insurgent caring.” These share an understanding that the environment is a class question. The compulsive force that drives businesses to exploit workers drives them to plunder and despoil nature too. Ending the latter requires abolishing the former.
In this survey of the terrain, there is no ‘degrowth vs GND’ rivalry as such. Between the camp heartlands there clearly is. Growth boosterism and degrowth are incompatible, and the difference is often infused with morality and aesthetics—on one hand, a fetishism of technology, a belief that there exist no environmental limits and a dogma that ‘growth is good’; on the other, a self-righteous frugality and zeal for the hair shirt. But at the left corners, the tents are so close as to practically touch. The greater clashes will occur within each.
This Author
Gareth Dale teaches politics at Brunel University. He is a co-editor of Green Growth (Zed, 2016). His articles are available online. He tweets at @Gareth_Dale. This article was first published on OpenDemocracy, and is part of a new series on economic growth. Image: nrkbeta.
John Tyndall was a mountaineer, prolific writer of science books, prominent physicist and professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He was also an original member of the X Club, an exclusive scientific dining club whose members were frequent contributors to the well-regarded journal Nature.
It is not surprising that Tyndall reached the heights of scientific achievement and recognition, given his doctorate, easy access to the Royal Institution’s laboratories, social and intellectual friendships and networks with some of the greatest minds of the Victorian period.
For more than 160 years, Irish-born Tyndall has been credited with the original discovery of the absorption of thermal radiation by carbon dioxide and water vapor — the very cornerstone of our current understanding of climate change, weather and meteorology. He was the first to clearly demonstrate and understand the physical basis of the greenhouse effect.
‘Originality and precision’
Another first originated with a hidden figure in the history of climate science, one who remained unacknowledged until brought to light in 2011 by independent researcher Raymond Sorenson.
Later researched by writer John Perlin and the main subject of a symposium held in May 2018 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, this previously unknown contributor to our current understanding of climate change was an American amateur scientist, a suffragette and a woman: Eunice Newton Foote, born 200 years ago.
Three years before Tyndall first published his broad findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London in 1859, Foote demonstrated the absorption of solar heat by carbon dioxide and water vapor and wrote up her findings in a paper entitled “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.” While Foote did not differentiate between heat from the whole solar spectrum and long-wave infrared, which is actually responsible for the greenhouse effect, she does seem to be the first to suggest that changing amounts of carbon dioxide and water vapor could alter the climate.
Tyndall understood the difference, though he did not use the term “long-wave infrared” because it was not yet invented.
Certainly, Tyndall’s equipment, laboratory and experimental results were more sophisticated than Foote’s, and he is rightly credited with establishing the experimental basis for the greenhouse effect, first suggested by Swiss physicist Horace Bénédict de Saussure in the the 1760s and later developed by French mathematician Joseph Fourier in the 1820s and French physicist Claude Pouillet in 1836 And yet, while acknowledging these men’s work, Tyndall did not reference Foote’s. Why?
There is some debate about whether Tyndall even knew of Foote’s work, though there was some mention of her paper in various North American publications. For example, the September 13, 1856, issue of Scientific American, reported that her experiment on the effects of the sun’s rays on different gases afforded “abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision.”
Prejudice
According to Roland Jackson, Tyndall’s biographer, general editor of his correspondence and past chief executive of the British Science Association, it seems safe to assume that “if anyone had seen it and understood its significance, there would be some evidence of this, as they would have informed Tyndall and/or each other.”
But to date, not a single reference to her work has been found in any letter, journal or publication of the major contemporary figures in this field. Therefore, it seems most likely that very little, if any, significant discussion or proper citations or summaries of her study reached England during the time Tyndall was working on and publishing his research.
Did Tyndall know about Foote’s work and simply ignore it because she was an amateur, an American or a woman? Perhaps.
During Victorian England, a prejudice against amateurs, Americans and women as not quite as capable or professional as British men certainly existed. And Tyndall was no democrat and no supporter of female emancipation.
Did he know about the significance of Foote’s study and actively plagiarized it? Maybe, although, as Jackson points out, this would be entirely out of character and extremely risky. Furthermore, both Jackson and Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Science and the University of Reading in England, feel that if Tyndall had actually known about Foote’s results, he would have started his experiments using CO2 and water vapor. He didn’t: Tyndall initially tried dry air, oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen before experimenting on CO2and water vapor.
Lack of credit
Is the lack of credit for Foote linked to insufficient information, prejudice or a deliberate omission on Tyndall’s part?
Whatever the truth is, and we may never know, it is now clear that Foote’s experiment added to the understanding of climate science.
As Katharine Hayhoe, co-director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, has pointed out, while Foote’s research did not directly establish the physical basis of what we now call the greenhouse effect, she appears to have been the first person to notice the ability of carbon dioxide and water vapor to absorb heat and to make a direct link between the variability of these atmospheric constituents and climate change.
For this achievement, Foote clearly deserves a place on the pantheon of past and present climate scientists and those to come in the future.
This Author
Dawn Starin is an anthropologist. Her articles have appeared in both peer-reviewed journals and in popular publications as varied as Al Jazeera, the Ecologist,The Humanist, New Internationalist, New Statesman, The New York Times, Philosophy Now, and Scientific American amongst others.
Ramba, a female elephant, arrived at Santuário de Elefantes do Brasil (Brazil Elephants Sanctuary) after a 73 hour trip all the way from Chile. The groundbreaking decision of a Brazilian judge was the icing on the cake, as if the news of Ramba’ freedom from decades of captivity and mistreatment was not good enough.
A few days before Ramba’s transfer began, Judge Leonísio Salles de Abreu Junior, from the first Civil Court at Chapada dos Guimarães prohibited the local government to charge the sanctuary R$ 50,000 (approximately US$13,000) – a tax on the movement of goods known as ICMS. The reason presented was as simple as this: Ramba is not a thing to be imported.
The judge argued that, in practical terms, Ramba was not acquired by the sanctuary nor does she belong to it in patrimonial terms, so she cannot be considered as a commodity nor good purchased for importation purposes.
Non-human rights
The judge pointed out that Ramba’s position, far from being a commodity, is now that of a guest who seeks a new home far from the harm that human evil has already caused her.
Usually the taxation on goods is charged on any kind of animal transfer from one place to another within the country, which makes Abreu Junior’s decision an important pivot and a huge contribution to the efforts of lawyers who work on the recognition of non-human rights all over the world.
The Judge also added an animal cruelty perspective to the unprecedented decision: “It cannot be forgotten that the collection of the tax would cause too much suffering for Ramba, enhanced by the immense physical and emotional stress caused by air transport.”
Ramba is 52 years old and had been living in a small barn at Rancágua Park Safari in Chile since 2012. In fact, the move to the safari itself was a Judicial conquest. Ramba had been being exploited in circuses for more than 30 years in Chile and Argentina.
The conditions at the barn were obviously not good enough – she was alone in a small area, left to deal with the harsh Chilean winter. After a few years of negotiation and group effort of local NGO Ecópolis, Global Sanctuary for Elephants (GSE) and the Brazilian sanctuary, Ramba’s transfer to a peaceful life in an adequate space alongside other elephants was made possible.
The news from the sanctuary could not be better. “Rambita” is already sharing her living space with Rana and Maia, another guest of the sanctuary, and has approached the new friend with a warm welcome. She is also enjoying deserved mud and sand baths and her skin is with a healthy reddish tone.
Stay tuned for more information on Ramba by following the SEB Facebook page.
Looking for someone to blame for climate change was “unhelpful”, and users of fossil fuels were part of the problem as well as producers, according to senior executives at BP.
Speaking at the One Young World summit in London this week, the company’s chief executive Bob Dudley said: “We’ve had generations of using energy… so we’re all part of the problem.”
“We [BP] want to be part of leading this transition but we also work in places that have no energy so it’s going to take a little longer than people would like.”
Blame unhelpful
BP’s chief economist Spencer Dale added: “I think the concept of looking for somebody to blame is not really the right way of thinking about this. It’s unhelpful.”
The provision of energy had done more than any single thing in terms of raising human welfare. Now the type of energy society uses needs to be changed rapidly, so blame was not “the right thing,” he said.
“If you’re sat in Europe right now, I can understand why you’re worried about carbon emissions. Go to Delhi – in Delhi they really worry about access to energy,” he said. Both of those issues needed to be solved, and that would take many types of energy, he said.
Disgraceful deflection
But Areeba Hamid, senior climate campaigner at Greenpeace UK, said that it was a disgrace that BP was trying to deflect the blame onto the public.
BP had spent more than £18 million since 2010 lobbying the EU in attempts to undermine action on the climate emergency, she said, pointing to research on lobbying by oil and gas majors conducted by Greenpeace EU along with Corporate Europe Observatory, Food & Water Europe and Friends of the Earth Europe.
“Until the fossil fuel giants bring an end to their destructive business models by either shifting efforts to renewable energy or shutting up shop, the blame lies solely at their door,” she said.
This Author
Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.
More than 100 seal pups have been welcomed on a Scottish island as birthing season approaches its peak.
More than 2,500 pups are born annually on the Isle of May, with the first arriving from mid-September.
The number of births usually peaks in early November before the last pup is born in mid-December.
Pups
It transforms the island in the Firth of Forth each year into one of the UK’s most important grey seal colonies.
The Isle of May is owned and managed by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) as a national nature reserve.
It is closed to the public during seal season.
David Steel from SNH said: “Autumn is a fantastic time of year on the island, when areas once dominated by seabirds are completely taken over by seals and their pups.
Peace
“It’s a sight that not many get to witness as the island is closed to visitors, but watching those first interactions between pup and mum is just wonderful.
“This is a key time of year for breeding grey seals not just on the Isle of May but at haul-out sites around the shores of Scotland.
“While we all love the opportunity to see wildlife spectacles like this, it’s important that seals are not approached or disturbed and the pups are allowed to grow and explore in peace.”
Crabs can navigate their way around a complex maze and remember the route to find food, research has found.
Researchers at Swansea University tested 12 common shore crabs over four weeks, placing food at the end of the maze each time.
The route to the end of the maze required five changes in direction and included three dead ends.
Crustaceans
Over the four-week period, the crabs improved both the time they took to find the food and reduced the number of wrong turns they made.
When they returned to the maze two weeks later – without any food on offer – they all reached the end within eight minutes.
Crabs that had not been in the maze before took far longer to reach the end, with some not making it during the one-hour study period.
Dr Ed Pope, a marine biologist, said the study aimed to gain a better understanding of spatial learning in crustaceans.
Adapt
“This study is important because we know that insects, especially ants and bees, have some impressive mental abilities but we haven’t really looked for them in their aquatic counterparts,” Dr Pope, of Swansea University, said.
“The fact that crabs show a similar ability to insects is, in some ways, not that surprising but it is great to be able to show it so clearly.
“This work opens the door to more sophisticated experiments looking at how changing ocean conditions might affect crabs’ ability to learn and adapt to find food in future.”
The research is published in the journal Biology Letters.
Even those of us who are politically obsessed enough to watch the parliament channel or cling to minute-by-minute updates on digital news platforms will have lost count of how many votes have been lost by the government.
A general election was threatened if the Programme Bill failed to pass through the House – in what many have interpreted as an act of petulance – and yet the official statement in its wake failed to mention any such event.
Radar
However, we’re now at a point that the oft talked about and ever-looming election now seems inevitable. This will quite possibly be the most important in British history – but not because of Brexit.
We’re probably at our most aware that our political system is in a state of crisis. Inept, stale and suffering from ever-lasting inertia. After more than three years of going in circles, while shamefully neglecting all that isn’t directly a part of the withdrawal process, many are likely in shock that we’re about to enter the year 2020, three years on the referendum.
After enduring those three gruelling, tiresome and repetitive years of Brexit driven political drivel from those elected to parliament and outside of it, we’re on the cusp of an opportunity to replace those elected to represent us.
On the surface, it feels as if almost every other political consideration has been an afterthought at best.
However, perhaps a little under the radar, the Labour Party and activists within it have been pushing for and developing a raft of new and ambitious policy proposals.
Bold
Standing out among them, due to its scope and ambition, is a Green New Deal motion passed at the Autumn conference by the young activist campaign group Labour for a Green New Deal.
Designed as a national action plan with the purpose of rapidly tackling the climate crisis while also addressing social inequality, the motion sets Labour apart from the rest as having one of the most ambitious climate policies of a major political party anywhere in the world.
That being said, in a political and media landscape dominated by Brexit and character assassinations, the party lags behind in polls. Though the last few years should have taught us by now that we pay too much attention to polling at our own peril.
However, the appetite for concise action on the climate is glaringly evident and it’s vital that this is seen at polling stations across the country.
In just the last nine months, tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets month after month demanding bold and ambitious action on the climate and ecological crisis, culminating with the record-shattering Global Climate Strike in September.
Action
It feels apparent that young people will have a decisive say in the appointment of the next government amidst widespread political activation. Furthermore, thousands have been rallying their communities and thousands more have been arrested across the UK with the emergence of Extinction Rebellion.
The timeframes for action are stark. We need an entire reimagining of our societies and economies, requiring massive economic mobilisation in the immediate years, not seen since the last World War.
A period of unprecedented transition is required to rapidly wean our fossil drenched industrial systems away from the death sentences of hydrocarbon extraction, industrial animal agriculture and perpetual growth and consumption.
It’s increasingly apparent that we cannot afford to have a government in place that isn’t committed to the necessary action, with five years until the next elected an unconscionable prospect.
Ambitious
With every passing moment and year of inaction, the potential to stave off warming above 1.5 degrees diminishes even further, precisely why this election needs to be beyond Brexit.
Just two years on from the IPCC 1.5 degree report which articulated the devastating position humankind finds itself in, we’re coming into an election after three years of climate mitigation stagnation.
The result? A clear and unequivocal need to elect a government with a strong mandate for equitable climate action, ambitious in scale and internationalist in essence.
If we proceed to elect a government that isn’t prepared to lead us towards a rapid transition away from the fossil fuel economy, we’re locked in to a further five years of inaction, ensuring we lose nearly half the time available to embark on this necessarily ambitious task to secure our futures. There is no time to delay.
The Author
Jake Woodier works for the UK Student Climate Network and is an organiser with Green New Deal UK. You can register to voteonline.
The future of trade policy in the UK has come under renewed scrutiny as Brexit dominates the headlines. Boris Johnson is clearly treating the UK’s exit from the European Union as an opportunity to form a new trade pact with the United States.
But civil society groups fear that such an agreement would undermine food standards, push the NHS further towards privatisation, and prevent the UK from taking necessary steps to combat the climate crisis – all without requiring approval from Parliament.
Meanwhile, Parliament’s International Trade Committee recently launched an inquiryinto how trade policy can support “positive environmental outcomes” – an admirable goal, to be sure, but one which would require a drastic change of attitudes towards trade among politicians of all parties.
Global economy
As of yet, that change of attitudes has yet to occur. The connection between trade and the climate crisis runs deeper than practically any prominent politician has been willing to acknowledge.
Imagine a world where food routinely gets shipped thousands of miles away to be processed, then shipped back to be sold right where it started.
Imagine cows from Mexico being fed corn imported from the United States, then being exported to the United States for butchering, and the resulting meat being shipped back to Mexico, one last time, to be sold.
Imagine a world in which, in most years since 2005, China has somehow managed to import more goods from itself than from the USA, one of its largest trading partners.
This may sound like the premise of some darkly comic, faintly dystopian film, but it’s no joke – in fact, it is the daily reality of international trade in our global economy.
‘Re-importation’
The above examples are all instances of ‘re-importation’ – that is, countries shipping their own goods overseas only to ship them back again at a later stage in the production chain. And these are far from the only instances of this head-scratching phenomenon.
In the waters off the coast of Norway, cod arrive every year after an impressive migratory journey, having swum thousands of miles around the Arctic Circle in search of spawning grounds.
Yet this migration pales in comparison to the one the fish undertake after being caught: they’re sent to China to be fileted before returning to supermarkets in Scandinavia to be sold.
This globalisation of the seafood supply chain extends to the US as well; more than half of the seafood caught in Alaska is processed in China, and much of it gets sent right back to American grocery store shelves.
Compounding the insanity of re-importation is the equally baffling phenomenon of redundant trade. This is a common practice whereby countries both import and export huge quantities of identical products in a given year.
To take a particularly striking example, in 2007, Britain imported 15,000 tons of chocolate-covered waffles, while exporting 14,000 tons. In 2017, the US both imported and exported nearly 1.5 million tons of beef, and nearly half a million tons of potatoes. In 2016, 213,000 tons of liquid milk arrived in the UK – a windfall, had not 545,000 tons of milk also left the UK over the course of that same year.
Free trade
On the face of it, this kind of trade makes no economic sense. Why would it be worth the immense cost – in money as well as fuel – of sending perfectly good food abroad only to bring it right back again? The answer lies in the way the global economy is structured.
‘Free trade’ agreements allow transnational corporations to access labour and resources almost anywhere, enabling them to take advantage of tax loopholes and national differences in labour and environmental standards.
Meanwhile, direct and indirect subsidies for fossil fuels, on the order of $5 trillion per year worldwide, allow the costs of shipping to be largely borne by taxpayers and the environment instead of the businesses that actually engage in it. In combination, these structural forces lead to insane levels of international transport that serve no purpose other than boosting corporate profits.
The consequences of this bad behavior are already severe, and set to become worse in the coming decades. Small farmers around the world have seen their livelihoods undermined by influxes of cheap imported food, or forced to export their food instead of selling locally. Meanwhile, their climate-resilient agricultural practices are actively discouraged by the WTO and ‘free trade’ agreements.
Food processing and packaging – both critical for food that’s going to be shipped a long way from where it was produced – account for a significant proportion of the global food system’s greenhouse gas emissions.
And even after that packaging has been thrown into the nearest recycling bin, it typically undergoes yet another long-distance journey before being processed. Before China stopped allowing foreign waste imports in 2018, British companies alone had shipped more than 2.7m tons of plastic wasteto China and Hong Kong since 2012 – two-thirds of the UK’s total waste plastic exports. With the ban now in place, most of Britain’s plastic waste is simply being shipped elsewhere.
International transport
Accruing unnecessary miles of shipping is not a feature unique to food or plastic waste. The components of a typical smartphone, for example, have traveled a collective half-million miles – touching down on three continents – before landing in your pocket.
This sprawling globalisation of the supply chain has grown alongside trade liberalization, to the point where now roughly 30 percentof the value of global exports comes from foreign inputs – up from 25 percent in 1990.
This kind of excessive trade in materials is why carbon emissions from international transport are growing nearly three times faster than emissions from other sources. At current rates of growth, international trade by sea and air will, by 2050, emit about as much CO2 as the entire European Union does today.
The link between liberalised trade policies and carbon emissions is clear and straightforward. A recent study from Japan’s Kyushu University found that when countries reduce or eliminate their tariffs – particularly on resource-intensive industries like mining and manufacturing – they see corresponding increases in the amount of carbon emissions associated with imported goods.
This is due in large part to the carbon cost of global transport, but there are other factors at play as well, tied to the trade and investment treaties that have been a prominent feature of the global economy since the mid-20thcentury.
Future profits
These treaties often include Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)provisions, which give corporations the right to sue national governments for, among other things, introducing environmental regulations that might curb future expected profits.
For example, the UK-based fossil fuel company Rockhopper is currently suing Italy for US$350 millionin damages and “lost future profits”, because Italy banned new offshore drilling operations in 2015 due to sustained public pressure.
This is just one among many instancesof the ISDS system leading to corporate abuses of power at the expense of planetary health. Indeed, environmental regulations are the fastest-growing triggerfor ISDS cases being filed, and mining and energy companiesare now the most frequent users of ISDS mechanisms.
Essentially, ISDS clauses in trade treaties have created a parallel court system in which conflicts of interest are rife, arbitrators are heavily incentivised to side with corporations (including fossil fuel companies) over the public interest, and decision-making happens largely outside the public view.
But in addition to producing corporate-friendly rulings, the ISDS system contributes to climate chaos in an even more sinister way, through what’s called ‘regulatory chill’. Countries that have signed treaties containing ISDS clauses often feel pressured not to implement new environmental laws and regulations, simply because of the threat of being sued in an ISDS tribunal.
For example, a proposed law that would have phased out oil and gas extraction in France was watered down beyond recognitionafter a Canadian fossil fuel company threatened to sue France in an ISDS court. And in a story that broke during the writing of this piece, German company Uniper threatenedto bring an ISDS case against the Netherlands for deciding to phase out coal-fired power plants by 2030.
Climate policy
In this way, the number of cases brought before ISDS tribunals actually understates the impact of trade treaties on climate policy. Who knows how many potential regulations have never seen the light of day due to the threat of Big Oil taking countries to court?
With climate policy still largely in its infancy – with many necessary regulations not yet ‘on the books’ worldwide – the chilling effect of ISDS is a serious obstacle.
The upshot of all this is that if countries are going to effectively combat the climate crisis, they will have to pay close attention to trade policy. Specifically, they’ll need to change it so that unrestricted, unlimited ‘free trade’ is no longer an option.
But policymakers currently have little incentive to reduce international trade because, bizarrely, emissions from global trade do not appear in any nation’s carbon accounting. There are plenty of ways to fix this – for example, emissions from trade could be assigned to countries on the basis of where goods start out, where they end up, or where the ships and planes transporting them are registered.
All that countries would have to do is agree on a standard. But at the moment no country is assigned responsibility for these floating emissions. The result is a situation in which policymakers promise to reduce carbon emissions while simultaneously working to expand global trade through treaties and liberalisation – even though these two goals are wholly incompatible.
Peoples’ movements
With policymakers continuing to drag their feet, the impetus for real change in the way we conduct global trade will have to come from peoples’ movements working together to make their voices heard. We must call for an end to the deregulatory ‘free trade’ and tax policies that make practices like re-importation and redundant trade profitable.
One of the most critical steps towards sanity would be the removal of subsidies for fossil fuels. When taxpayers stop paying part of the cost of global transport, transnational corporations will have to radically reconsider the way they operate.
These changes will be vigorously opposed by big global businesses, which means that generating momentum for trade policies that promote community health and ecological stability won’t happen overnight.
But the first step is raising awareness of trade as a climate issue, and overcoming the unwillingness of most major media outlets, politicians, and think-tanks to discuss it critically.
We hope they can help draw attention to the absurdity of the current system, point to healthier alternatives, and make the issue of global trade approachable and understandable for a wide audience. So please, share them with people you know, and start a conversation around this critical topic.
This Author
Sean Keller is a member of the Local Futures core team.
Three hundred MPs are calling on the trustees of the £700m Parliamentary Pension Fund to take the financial risks of the climate crisis seriously and end investments in fossil fuel companies.
The cross-party initiative, backed by the leaders of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the SNP as well as senior Conservatives, follows Parliament’s declaration of a climate emergency in May earlier this year and puts pressure on the trustees of the fund as they prepare to announce a new “Climate Change Investment Policy” in November.
The fund’s largest single holding is £11.6 million of shares in BP Plc, and it also holds £10.9 million in Royal Dutch Shell. If the trustees agree to the MPs’ demands it will be a powerful symbolic boost for the global movement to divest from fossil fuels, which has now been backed by more than 1000 funds worth over $11 trillion.
Showing leadership
Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, who has championed the initiative, said: “The climate emergency requires that we keep fossil fuels in the ground.
“I’ve been calling for fossil fuel divestment for well over five years and am encouraged by the huge number of MPs who now agree that we must move our investments away from the polluting industries of the past, and instead support policies that will bring about a clean energy future”.
Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, said: “Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels is probably the single most urgent challenge we face if we are to avoid a really unmanageable climate crisis in the next few decades, with all the human cost this will entail.
“Parliamentarians of all parties have the opportunity to show real leadership on this question and to make our existing national commitments more of a reality. Divestment will send a positive and hopeful message to the people of this country – and to those in vulnerable communities across the globe who will be most immediately affected by climate-related disasters.’
The Divest Parliament Pledge has been signed by 300 current MPs, including Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn; Liberal Democrat Leader Jo Swinson; SNP Westminster Leader Ian Blackford and Conservative Culture Secretary Nicky Morgan. It has also been backed by 30 former MPs including Lord Deben, Chair of the Committee on Climate Change, and Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan.
Responsibility
The pledge states: “Unmitigated climate change threatens to undermine our economy, shared environment and global security. Under the UK’s Climate Change Act and the Paris Agreement, the UK is committed to limiting warming to well below 2C and to aim for no more than 1.5C.
“This requires leaving the vast majority of fossil fuel reserves unburnt, creating the real possibility of fossil fuel assets becoming stranded – with profound implications for the global economy.
“We believe Members of Parliament have a responsibility to act on climate change, and a unique opportunity to show leadership on climate action, responsible investment and the management of climate risk through addressing the practices of our own pension fund.
“As MPs past and present, and members of the Parliamentary Pension Fund, we call on the Trustees to uphold their fiduciary duty and take the financial risks of climate change seriously. We ask they quantify, disclose and review the fund’s investments in carbon-intensive industries, engage in a dialogue with fund members and managers on responsible investment, and commit to phasing out fossil fuel investments over an appropriate time-scale.”
Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, the Environmental Audit Committee, and major global fund managers have warned that ordinary people’s pensions are now at risk because they are exposed to overvalued carbon assets as the world moves quickly towards cheaper, greener renewables, and governments legislate for net-zero emissions.
Climate crisis
As the global climate crisis worsens, pressure is mounting on leaders at international, national and local levels to take tangible action. If the trustees of the Parliamentary Pension Fund follow the call for divestment, the fund would join the Irish National Infrastructure Fund, the Greater London Authority’s Pension Fund, the New York City Pension fund, local authorities including Southwark and Islington, and two thirds of UK universities, who have all ended investment in fossil fuel companies.
David Warburton, Conservative MP for Somerton and Frome said: “Parliament is fully committed to our net zero emission target and to get there we must invest billions into renewable infrastructure, energy efficiency and zero carbon technology.
“Pension funds have an exciting role to play in financing the transition to a net zero future, and it is really positive to see such a large group of cross party MPs coming together to pressure our pension fund trustees to phase out carbon intensive investments, and to ramp up positive investments into a green and prosperous future.”
Helen Hayes, Labour MP for Dulwich and West Norwood said: “Local authorities like Southwark and Lambeth, and the Mayor of London are showing the political leadership required to tackle the climate crisis by divesting their pension funds from fossil fuels.
“Parliament must now follow suit, and bring forward policies that are compliant with net zero emissions and the scale of the climate crisis. This requires keeping fossil fuels in the ground, and introducing long term policies that ensure clean energy can flourish.”
Patrick Killoran, UK Organiser at 350.org, said: “While our climate begins to unravel with fatal heatwaves and devastating floods, BP and Shell continue to invest billions in fuelling this crisis. At a time of climate breakdown, it is unacceptable for political leaders to be investing in or supporting policies that promote the fossil fuel industry.
“We are encouraged that MPs from across the political spectrum are backing up the ‘Climate Emergency’ rhetoric with action to divest from fossil fuels. We hope the pension fund Trustees hear these loud calls for fossil fuel divestment and produce a new investment strategy that will help bring about a fossil free future”.
This Author
Marianne Brooker is content editor of The Ecologist. This article based on a press release from Divest Parliament.
