Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Like so many of us, Vivian Woodell found his mission in life by accident. At the age of 16 he joined his local retail Co-op. “I just liked the idea of it,” he explains.

The year was 1979, around the time Margaret Thatcher came to power. “The whole idea of a shop owned by its customers appealed to me at a time when mainstream thinking was all about privatisation. So that’s where I did my shopping.”

Five years later, just after finishing university, Woodell took a friend who was visiting from Ghana to his local Co-op in Oxford. The friend immediately noticed it was selling Outspan oranges – a prominent South African brand – in defiance of the UN anti-apartheid boycott. After a fruitless correspondence with management, Woodell recalls, “I thought, ‘I’m a member of this Co-op and I’ve got as much right to be heard as anyone else!’ So I put in my motion for the next members’ meeting.

Reviving a radical agenda
“We didn’t win, but out of that meeting a ginger group of local members came together. We all wanted to push for change, and reinvigorate the Co-op in line with its founding principles. At the time we were widely viewed as a bunch of radicals – but the whole cooperative movement was set up by people with a radical agenda for economic change, the Rochdale Pioneers – and we thought the organisation we were dealing with was not reflecting that spirit.

“So three of us stood for election for various positions and in 1985 we swept the board, all getting elected. That’s how I found myself, at the age of 23, the youngest director anyone could remember. It’s hardly surprising that the management regarded me as naive and green behind the ears and would say things like, ‘This kind of idealistic stuff is all very well, but what do you know about running a business?’ I didn’t understand at first that you don’t change an organisation just by passing resolutions! But we made an impact. In the end we recruited a new chief executive who shared our vision, and we helped to start a broader movement to bring the Co-op’s founding values back to life and make it more commercially successful.”

Surviving and thriving as a business with values
Still, those jibes about his lack of business experience rankled. “This is what impelled me to start up The Phone Co-op – a new mass market business in a former state-owned industry with a lot of sharp practice, dogged by debt and financial failures – and show there was a better way of doing it as a consumer cooperative owned by its members. In our early years every single one of our suppliers went through insolvency! But we survived by connecting the business with our values, meeting customers’ needs, and avoiding financial risk.”

Launched in 1998 in a spare bedroom in Woodell’s home in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, with a handful of members and capital of £36,000, The Phone Co-op now has a £12.5 million turnover and 30,000 customers, among them charities, other co-ops, businesses and individuals. It has never gone into debt, and its growth is financed entirely from retained profits and members’ capital, which now stands at £7 million. It employs more than 70 staff, who share 11% of profits each year based on the number of hours worked, and has just bought a large new office building in the town centre, where renovations are about to begin.

Investing in new co-operative ventures
But what excites Woodell most is that The Phone Co-op has the financial muscle to help establish and support new cooperative ventures, and has so far invested in over 30, many of them in the renewable energy sector. A timely £300,000 it invested in Southill Community Energy enabled this 4.8MW solar co-op to get off the ground a few years ago, and it has made similar investments in projects from Northern Ireland to Cornwall. It also has its own 50kW solar farm in Gloucestershire, and is a founder member of Co-operative Renewables, a wind and solar power co-op that has installed hundreds of kilowatts of solar capacity on buildings owned by other cooperative societies. Other investments include student housing co-ops in Birmingham and Sheffield, a Fairtrade football manufacturing co-op, and local pubs owned and run by the communities they serve.

One thing that’s clear is that Woodell could have been a very successful businessman in his own right – and could have made a huge pile of cash for himself. Does he ever regret his decision to commit so firmly to the cooperative movement rather than concentrate on number one? “That was not my aspiration. I did not set out to make myself rich. I wanted to prove that a cooperative approach could do it better. We all make choices in life. Is it more important to get rich, or to do something that matters to you?

“In any case, The Phone Co-op is not just me – it’s all the people who have contributed to it with their energy and enthusiasm and shared values. And it owes its success precisely to the fact that it is a cooperative and not just another company. Most people don’t enjoy dealing with their telecoms company, but here the staff people talk to know that their customers are the owners, and it’s a completely different relationship.

Creating a resilient economy
“The beauty of co-ops is that the customers and workers are the stakeholders, and that’s why it works so well. Under a purely capitalist system, human relationships are commodified and become a means to an end – which is to make money. Here people are at the centre and capital is just a means to an end. We exist to provide a service to our members and other customers that meets their needs, in a way that reflects their values.”

A more cooperative economy is also much more stable and resilient than all-out capitalism, Woodell insists. “Just look at the privatised building societies: every single one has either failed like Northern Rock or been taken over. Not one survives. But with a few exceptions, those that remained as mutuals are still in business and are among the strongest financial institutions in the country.

“Look more widely, and you can see that cooperatives form a real backbone of the global economy – bigger than all the multinationals put together! A single farmers’ co-op in India, IFFCO, has 55 million members, the International Co-operative Alliance represents well over a billion co-op members at the UN, and co-ops employ more than 250 million people worldwide, who contribute over US$2 trillion to the global economy. And it has all grown from that one original co-op in Rochdale.

Taking back control
“Let’s just think about this idea of ‘taking back control’ that we heard so much about before the [Brexit] referendum. It has been hijacked by the nationalist right and now it needs to be reclaimed by ordinary people who want more control over their lives – and this is what the cooperative movement can offer. It’s all about people being in control and helping each other.”

The cooperative economy, Woodell insists, offers an increasingly attractive alternative to mainstream capitalism. The Co-op he joined in 1979 – now merged with others to become The Midcounties Co-operative – has just started up a successful new childcare division, and its Co-operative Energy subsidiary, founded in 2010, is presenting a growing nationwide challenge to the ‘Big Six’ energy companies with its customer base of 400,000.

The ‘sharing economy’ is a co-operative economy
As a Midcounties director Woodell can take his share of the credit for all that, but his ambitions go much higher. “Think of the new global hegemons of the capitalist world: Google, Facebook, eBay. Their business model is to capture a dominant position in an online marketplace that becomes unassailable. But they all work by providing a platform for people to transact with each other, making themselves the indispensable intermediary. They like to call it the ‘sharing economy’, but it’s not – it’s all about monopoly and extraction. This kind of thing should be done by co-ops! Uber should be owned by taxi drivers, and Airbnb by accommodation providers and travellers.

“One obstacle to success is that these huge, dominating businesses have emerged through the venture capital route – where many companies are funded in the hope that just one will be massively successful. That is not how the cooperative movement works. We need new models to allow co-ops to develop at scale. And people are working on it – look at the ‘open.coop’ website, which is brimming with new ideas and initiatives on ‘platform co-ops’, owned and run by their members, building a collaborative, sustainable alternative to the standard internet model.”

A speaker at the open.coop 2017 meeting in London this February, Woodell is looking boldly to the future of co-ops and cooperation. But his feet remain firmly on the ground. The latest venture he has joined is West Oxfordshire Community Transport, set up by local people to keep bus services going across the area in the face of shrinking county council budgets. After buying the bus from the previous operator, it began to run its first local service in Witney just two days before we met.

Former local MP David Cameron might like to claim the venture for his long-forgotten ‘Big Society’. But really it’s much simpler than that: ordinary people coming together to take control of the things that matter to them in their everyday lives. And that, surely, is what cooperation is all about.

For more information: OpenCoop

This article was first published in Resurgence & Ecologist magazine, May/June 2017.

Oliver Tickell is contributing editor to Resurgence & Ecologist.

Last November, two-thirds of the 350 members of a South Australian-government initiated Citizens’ Jury rejected “under any circumstances” the plan to import vast amounts of high-level nuclear waste from around the world as a money-making venture.

The following week, SA Liberal Party Opposition leader Steven Marshall said that “[Premier] Jay Weatherill’s dream of turning South Australia into a nuclear waste dump is now dead.” Business SA chief Nigel McBride said: “Between the Liberals and the citizens’ jury, the thing is dead.”

And after months of uncertainty, Premier Weatherill has said in the past fortnight that the plan is “dead”, there is “no foreseeable opportunity for this”, and it is “not something that will be progressed by the Labor Party in Government”.

So is the plan dead? The Premier left himself some wriggle room, but the plan is as dead as it ever can be. If there was some life in the plan, it would be loudly proclaimed by SA’s Murdoch tabloid, The Advertiser. But The Advertiser responded to the Premier’s recent comments, to the death of the dump, with a deafening, deathly silence.

Royal Commission

It has been quite a ride to get to this point. The debate began in February 2015, when the Premier announced that a Royal Commission would be established to investigate commercial options across the nuclear fuel cycle. He appointed a nuclear advocate, former Navy man Kevin Scarce, as Royal Commissioner. Scarce said he would run a “balanced” Royal Commission and appointed four nuclear advocates to his advisory panel, balanced by one critic.

The final report of the Royal Commission, released in May 2016, was surprisingly downbeat given the multiple levels of pro-nuclear bias. It rejected ‒ on economic grounds ‒ almost all of the proposals it considered: uranium conversion and enrichment, nuclear fuel fabrication, conventional and Generation IV nuclear power reactors, and spent fuel reprocessing.

Australia’s handful of self-styled ‘ecomodernists’ or ‘pro-nuclear environmentalists’ united behind a push to import spent fuel and to use some of it to fuel Generation IV fast neutron reactors. They would have expected to persuade the stridently pro-nuclear Royal Commission to endorse their ideas. But the Royal Commission completely rejected the proposal, stating in its final report:

“[A]dvanced fast reactors and other innovative reactor designs are unlikely to be feasible or viable in the foreseeable future. The development of such a first-of-a-kind project in South Australia would have high commercial and technical risk. Although prototype and demonstration reactors are operating, there is no licensed, commercially proven design. Development to that point would require substantial capital investment.”

SA as the world’s nuclear waste dump

The only thing left standing (apart from the shrinking uranium mining industry) was the plan to import nuclear waste as a commercial venture. Based on commissioned research, the Royal Commission proposed importing 138,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste (spent nuclear fuel from power reactors) and 390,000 cubic metres of intermediate-level waste.

The SA Labor government then established a ‘Know Nuclear’ statewide promotional campaign under the guide of ‘consultation’. The Government also initiated the Citizens’ Jury.

The first sign that things weren’t going to plan for the Government was on 15 October 2016, when 3,000 people participated in a protest against the nuclear dump at Parliament House in Adelaide.

A few weeks later, on November 6, the Citizens’ Jury rejected the nuclear dump plan. Journalist Daniel Wills wrote: “This “bold” idea looks to have just gone up in a giant mushroom cloud. When Premier Jay Weatherill formed the citizens’ jury to review the findings of a Royal Commission that recommended that SA set up a lucrative nuclear storage industry, he professed confidence that a well-informed cross-section of the state would make a wise judgment. Late Sunday, it handed down a stunning and overwhelming rejection of the proposal.

“Brutally, jurors cited a lack of trust even in what they had been asked to do and their concerns that consent was being manufactured. Others skewered the Government’s basic competency to get things done, doubting that it could pursue the industry safely and deliver the dump on-budget.”

In the immediate aftermath of the Citizens’ Jury, the SA Liberal Party and the Nick Xenophon Team announced that they would actively campaign against the dump in the lead-up to the March 2018 state election. The SA Greens were opposed from the start.

Premier Weatherill previously said that he established the Citizens’ Jury because he could sense that there is a “massive issue of trust in government”. It was expected that when he called a press conference on November 14, the Premier would accept the Jury’s verdict and dump the dump. But he announced that he wanted to hold a referendum on the issue, as well as giving affected Aboriginal communities a right of veto. Nuclear dumpsters went on an aggressive campaign to demonise the Citizens’ Jury though they surely knew that the bias in the Jury process was all in the pro-nuclear direction.

For the state government to initiate a referendum, enabling legislation would be required and non-government parties said they would block such legislation. The government didn’t push the matter ‒ perhaps because of the near-certainty that a referendum would be defeated. The statewide consultation process led by the government randomly surveyed over 6,000 South Australians and found 53% opposition to the proposal compared to 31% support.

Likewise, a November 2016 poll commissioned by the Sunday Mail found 35% support for the nuclear dump plan among 1,298 respondents. The newspaper’s report on its own poll was dishonest. Instead of noting that non-supporters outnumbered supporters by almost two to one, the Sunday Mail conflated responses to two different questions and claimed: “Majority support for creating a nuclear industry in South Australia is revealed in an extensive Sunday Mail survey of public opinion, in a rebuff to moves to shut down further study of a high-level waste dump.”

Then the Labor government announced on 15 November 2016 that it would not seek to repeal or amend the SA Nuclear Waste Storage Facility (Prohibition) Act 2000, legislation which imposes major constraints on the ability of the government to move forward with the nuclear waste import proposal. (The government also said that it would not encourage the federal government to repeal laws banning nuclear power, “recognising that in the short-to-medium term, nuclear power is not a cost-effective source of low-carbon electricity for South Australia”).

Economic claims exposed

Implausible claims about the potential economic benefits of importing nuclear waste had been discredited by this stage. The claims presented in the Royal Commission’s report were scrutinised by experts from the US-based Nuclear Economics Consulting Group (NECG), commissioned by a Joint Select Committee of the SA Parliament.

One of the many lies peddled by the Murdoch press was that the NECG report “backed Royal Commission findings that a nuclear dump could create $257 billion in revenue for South Australia.” In fact, the NECG report did no such thing. The kindest thing the report had to say was that the waste import project could be profitable under certain assumptions, but the report then raised serious questions about most of those assumptions.

The NECG report noted that the Royal Commission’s economic analysis failed to consider important issues which “have significant serious potential to adversely impact the project and its commercial outcomes”; that assumptions about price were “overly optimistic” in which case “project profitability is seriously at risk”; that the 25% cost contingency for delays and blowouts was likely to be a significant underestimate; and that the assumption the project would capture 50% of the available market had “little support or justification”.

The farcical and dishonest engineering of a positive economic case to proceed with the nuclear waste plan was exposed by ABC journalist Stephen Long on 8 November 2016: “Would you believe me if I told you the report that the commission has solely relied on was co-authored by the president and vice president of an advocacy group for the development of international nuclear waste facilities?”

No second opinion, no peer review … no wonder the Citizens’ Jury was unconvinced and unimpressed. The Jury’s report said: “It is impossible to provide an informed response to the issue of economics because the findings in the RCR [Royal Commission report] are based on unsubstantiated assumptions. This has caused the forecast estimates to provide inaccurate, optimistic, unrealistic economic projections.”

Professor Barbara Pocock, an economist at the University of South Australia, said: “All the economists who have replied to the analysis in that report have been critical of the fact that it is a ‘one quote’ situation. We haven’t got a critical analysis, we haven’t got a peer review of the analysis”.

Another South Australian economist, Prof. Richard Blandy from Adelaide University, said: “The forecast profitability of the proposed nuclear dump rests on highly optimistic assumptions. Such a dump could easily lose money instead of being a bonanza.”

The dump is finally dumped

To make its economic case, the Royal Commission assumed that tens of thousands of tonnes of high-level nuclear waste would be imported before work had even begun building a deep underground repository. The state government hosed down concerns about potential economic losses by raising the prospect of customer countries paying for the construction of waste storage and disposal infrastructure in SA.

But late last year, nuclear and energy utilities in Taiwan ‒ seen as one of the most promising potential customer countries ‒ made it clear that they would not pay one cent towards the establishment of storage and disposal infrastructure in SA and they would not consider sending nuclear waste overseas unless and until a repository was built and operational.

By the end of 2016, the nuclear dump plan was very nearly dead, and the Premier’s recent statement that it is “not something that will be progressed by the Labor Party in Government” was the final nail in the coffin. The dump has been dumped.

“Today’s news has come as a relief and is very much welcomed,” said Yankunytjatjara Native Title Aboriginal Corporation Chair and No Dump Alliance spokesperson Karina Lester. “We are glad that Jay has opened his ears and listened to the community of South Australia who have worked hard to be heard on this matter. We know nuclear is not the answer for our lands and people – we have always said NO.”

Narungga man and human rights activist Tauto Sansbury said: “We absolutely welcome Jay Weatherill’s courageous decision for looking after South Australia. It’s a great outcome for all involved.”

Lessons learned?

There is much to reflect on. The idea of Citizens’ Juries would seem, superficially, attractive. But bias is inevitable if the government establishing and funding the Jury process is strongly promoting (or opposing) the issue under question. In the case of the Jury investigating the nuclear waste plan, it backfired quite spectacularly on the government (Daniel Wills’ analysis in The Advertiser was arguably the most perceptive). Citizen Juries will be few and far between for the foreseeable future in Australia. A key lesson for political and corporate elites is that they shouldn’t let any semblance of democracy intrude on their plans.

The role of Murdoch tabloids needs comment, particularly in regions where the only mass circulation newspaper is a Murdoch tabloid. No-one would dispute that the NT News has a dumbing-down effect on political and intellectual life in the Northern Territory. Few would doubt that the Courier Mail does the same in Queensland.

South Australians need to grapple with the sad truth that its Murdoch tabloids ‒ the Advertiser and the Sunday Mail ‒ are a blight on the state. Their grossly imbalanced and wildly inaccurate coverage of the nuclear dump debate was ‒ with some honourable exceptions ‒ disgraceful. And that disgraceful history goes back decades; for example, a significant plume of radiation dusted Adelaide after one of the British bombs tests in the 1950s but the Advertiser chose not to report it.

The main lesson from the dump debate is a positive one: people power can upset the dopey, dangerous ideas driven by political and corporate elites and the Murdoch press. Sometimes. It was particularly heartening that the voices of Traditional Owners were loud and clear and were given great respect by the Citizens’ Jury.

The Jury’s report said: “There is a lack of Aboriginal consent. We believe that the government should accept that the Elders have said NO and stop ignoring their opinions. … Jay Weatherill said that without the consent of traditional owners of the land “it wouldn’t happen”. It is unethical to backtrack on this statement without losing authenticity in the engagement process.”

Premier Weatherill said that one of valuable things that emerged from the Citizens’ Jury “is that there was an expression of solidarity by the wider community with the Aboriginal community”.

Conversely, the most disheartening aspect of the debate was the willingness of the Murdoch press and pro-nuclear lobbyists to ignore or trash Aboriginal people opposed to the dump.

Another dump debate

Traditional Owners, environmentalists, church groups, trade unionists and everyone else who contributed to dumping the dump can rest up and celebrate for a moment. But only for a moment. Another dump proposal is very much alive: the federal government’s plan to establish a national nuclear waste dump in SA, either in the Flinders Ranges or on farming land near Kimba, west of Port Augusta.

In May 2016, Adnyamathanha Traditional Owner Regina McKenzie, who lives near the Flinders Ranges site, wrote:

“Last year I was awarded the SA Premier’s Natural Resource Management Award in the category of ‘Aboriginal Leadership – Female’ for working to protect land that is now being threatened with a nuclear waste dump. But Premier Jay Weatherill has been silent since the announcement of six short-listed dump sites last year, three of them in SA.

“Now the Flinders Ranges has been chosen as the preferred site and Mr Weatherill must speak up. The Premier can either support us ‒ just as the SA government supported the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta when their land was targeted for a national nuclear waste dump from 1998-2004 ‒ or he can support the federal government’s attack on us by maintaining his silence.”

Perhaps the Premier will find his voice on the federal government’s contentious proposal for a national nuclear waste dump in SA, now that his position on that debate is no longer complicated by the parallel debate about establishing a dump for foreign high-level nuclear waste.

This Author

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter.

Flipside, the East Anglian literary and arts festival, is launching a writing competition for writers of all ages in a search for inspirational writing about the environment.

 Here’s what you do. Choose any letter of the alphabet and use it in any way you like in a piece of writing on a green theme. Your submission can be a poem or a piece of prose, and could include some visual art. Whatever it is, it should refer to the environment and how to care for it.

First prize: £500 adults (16+), £200 for under 16s and all entries will be considered for inclusion in an anthology.

The competition will be judged by Jackie Kay MBE, the Scots Makar (poet Laureate), an award-winning poet and the Chancellor of the University of Salford; Jon Canter, a novelist and playwright, his work is often heard on BBC Radio 4; and Blake Morrison, poet, Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College London and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

 Writing Tips

Be exciting and original, play around with the theme and think about what the environment means to you.

Remember that non-fiction doesn’t have to be a serious piece of informative writing; it can include all manner of things – memoir, reportage, polemic, satire or biography.

You’ve got a limit of 500 words, but you don’t have to use all of them!

 The great, late English novelist John Fowles once advised: “At heart, write always for yourself, not for family and friends, for admired teachers, for reviewers or publishers; but make sure you write from your real self, not that one besotted by vainglorious dreams of a future self. One day you will realize that the true rewards of writing lie inalienably in the writing itself.”

Deadline

The deadline for entries is 31st July 2017 and the entry fee is £3 per piece (under 16s free). Further information on terms and conditions and submission guidelines is available here. 

On the morning of Friday, May 19^th 2017, John Moreno, a lawyer and environmental activist, was arrested in Todos Santos, a small town at the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Three agents in civilian clothes detained the 36-year-old father of three outside a coffee shop, and drove him to La Paz, the State Capital, in a brand new red pick up truck.

At first, Moreno was told only that he needed to appear in court to testify. Once he was inside the vehicle, he was informed that he was under arrest, and his cell phone was confiscated. He was only allowed one phone call at 5 PM – once all government offices were closed for the weekend – ensuring that he encountered a significant delay in preparing his defense strategy.

That same day, Joella Corado, a local 28-year-old health food storeowner and a former client of Moreno’s was also arrested and taken to La Paz. Both were accused of aggravated property theft and denied bail.

The Tres Santos Connection

For the past two years, John Moreno has acted as the pro-bono lawyer and spokesperson for a group of fishermen who oppose a touristic mega development called Tres Santos. Although slickly labelled as a sustainable and inclusive project that promises to create “an epicenter for well-being” for yoga and surf enthusiasts, the development has faced local opposition from the start.

With the construction of its beachfront hotel on the dunes of the Punta Lobos beach, Tres Santos jeopardizes a naturally protected ocean access point used by fishermen for generations. Locals also fear that the planned construction of almost 4,500 high end homes will lead to the dramatic and unsustainable growth of a town that today barely reaches 6,000 inhabitants, irreversibly straining an already imperiled water aquifer.

Alarmingly, this mega-project does not comply with the Todos Santos development plan (Plan de Desarrollo Urbano) approved in 2012, and yet the developers claim to have received all the necessary permits for construction. None of these permits have (to date) been published or made accessible to the public.

Ever since planning and construction began, Tres Santos skillfully combined a seductive media presence – featuring glowing write-ups in Condé Nast Traveler, The New York Times, and Vogue magazine – with old school repression. On February 2^nd 2016, some 200 police in riot gear forcefully removed a camp that fishermen had set up to protest the construction of the beachfront hotel, as well as the illegally-built massive seawall that surrounded it, eroding the beach, destroying dunes and wetlands, damaging fishing equipment and costly skiff motors.

Tres Santos also filed lawsuits against six of the most visible activists who voiced opposition to their project, including John Moreno. In a move clearly meant as intimidation, the activists are accused of invasion of property and dispossession. As no evidence exists to back up Tres Santos’ claims, and despite yet another hearing last Friday, none of the lawsuits have moved forward in court.

Negotiations between the fishermen and the development company stalled in early 2016, after the latter refused to drop charges against the activists that supported the community’s struggle. The lengthy process of starting a class-action suit on environmental grounds began, while international capital continued to pour into the Tres Santos project.

On February 3^rd 2017, Ambassador Alberto Szekely, an internationally-known environmental lawyer, jointly filed with John Moreno a Citizen’s Complaint against Tres Santos in the Federal Environmental Prosecution Office (PROFEPA), suing for environmental damage at Punta Lobos beach and for failure to comply with environmental and zoning laws. Many local residents signed the complaint and, after a long and difficult struggle to persuade the authorities to start enforcing the contravened laws, on April 17^th PROFEPA inspectors finally carried out an inspection of the beachfront development. Results are still pending.

Yet the hotel nonchalantly began accepting reservations in April as if no social conflict had ever existed, and as if the legality of their project was never in question.

On May 12^th, Carlos Mendoza Davis, the Governor of Baja California Sur, was photographed visiting the grounds of Tres Santos next to a beaming Javier Barrios, the CEO of Mira Companies (the Mexican subsidiary of the Colorado company Black Creek Group, financers of this development). He publicly declared his full support of investments such as Tres Santos, deeming them beneficial to the State as, he claimed, they opened the region to the world in an “environmentally and socially responsible manner”.

Local Authorities Intervene-in Support of Developers

John Moreno’s arrest came scarcely a week after the Governor’s visit to Tres Santos. He had been expecting it. Word had reached him that the Attorney General of Baja California Sur, Erasmo Palemon Alamilla, had met with Javier Barrios on the grounds of Tres Santos on March 8^th. Moreno knew that the authorities were combing though some of his old cases to see if they could find one that could be used against him. He did not know that the case that would be brought up, through an illegal manipulation of the file and the falsification of documents, was one that he had won three years before.

The case involved his former client Joella Corado, a dual Mexican and American citizen who was never actively involved in the struggle against Tres Santos. In 2014, Moreno successfully evicted a squatter, Enrique Chávez Ugarte, who had illegally taken possession of a property in Todos Santos owned by Corado.

Now, three years later, the case has been mysteriously re-opened, but this time, John and Joella are no longer the plaintiffs. Instead, in a reversal of roles, they are now themselves accused of aggravated property theft by Mr Chávez Ugarte, the same person they had successfully evicted before. Like Moreno, Joella Corado was arrested and denied bail.

According to the case documentation, John Moreno was notified of his change of status from plaintiff to accused on April 5^th, 2017 in Todos Santos, before police witnesses. However, that entire day he happened to be in court in La Paz, and he was able to provide documentation to back up his alibi. A forensic document examiner soon discovered that Moreno’s signature accepting the lawsuit notification was false, and that the accompanying witness statements had also been forged. The photocopies of the identifications included in the file clearly had been lifted from other cases, and the official stamp on the document was incompatible with the one from the town of Todos Santos.

In a May 24^th press conference on John Moreno’s case, his defense lawyer Arturo Rubio Ruiz directly linked the blatant irregularities of this case to the Attorney General of the State of Baja California Sur, Erasmo Palemon Alamilla, asking: “What kind of criminal is in charge of our state’s justice system? This isn’t John Moreno versus a company, this is us against a man who utilizes his power to service personal, toxic and mysterious interests. I blame the State Attorney exclusively and specifically. No prosecutor would dare do something like this without orders from above.”

Despite the crude obviousness of the forgery, the acting judge, Rosalía Cota Domínguez, refused to even consider the forensic evidence and ordered both Moreno and Corado to prison without bail on May 25th. Since then, the court has repeatedly used every stalling technique at its disposal, alleging excess work when asked for case documents.

Yet the arrest warrants for John Moreno and Joella Corado were processed and executed in record time. In a state that in 2016 had some 55,000 unsolved cases, and that still today has more than 2,000 arrest warrants pending, this selective efficiency becomes all the more outrageous. It should be no surprise that in a 2015 study by CIDE (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica), Baja California Sur was ranked last nationally with regards to transparency and access to information.

The judicial system of Baja California Sur clearly has the uncanny ability to speed up and slow down its processes at will. The travesty of justice that is evidenced by Moreno and Corado’s illegal incarceration can only be traced to the undue influence of international capital in a country where the highest level of government defends large-scale development at all costs.

The fragility of Mexico’s driest state, and the dire long-term consequences of such an environmentally irresponsible policy, seem to matter little in the rush to monetize natural resources. The same can be said of the basic human rights of its citizens. Although John Moreno was granted special protection from the Mexican Federal Government as part of a mechanism designed to protect defenders of human rights and journalists from violence and the deprivation of freedom, this protected status has done nothing to ensure his release.

Local Protests Surge Against Corruption and Impunity

Since the illegal arrest of John Moreno and Joella Corado on May 19th, numerous protests and vigils have been held, both in the town of Todos Santos and in the state capital of La Paz. Many consider Moreno a political prisoner of the government, and see Corado as collateral damage in a political campaign to clamp down on community resistance to development.

In a state that has seen the influx of drug-related violence rise drastically in the last few years, with 55 murders reported in January 2017 alone, civil society demands a transparent end ethical leadership that truly defends the rights of its citizens to live in dignity, safety and peace. John Moreno and Joella Corado are now symbols of a broad struggle for justice and human rights in Baja California Sur.

This Author

Viviane Mahieux is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature at UC Irvine

In the wake of the inconclusive general election result and bearing in mindthe forthcoming Brexit negotiations, we are writing to leaders of UKparliamentary parties to urge you to unite around a common cause – tackling climate change – as a way of helping to provide major economic, social and environmental benefits at this time of uncertainty.

Not only does there continue to be there very strong scientific evidence on the urgency of this global threat, but measures to tackle it offer major opportunities to exploit science and technology to create jobs, tackle fuel poverty, reduce local air pollution and provide many other co-benefits for British society.

The UK could now capitalise on the renewed international commitment to tackling climate change in the wake of the ill-informed decision of President Trump to withdraw the USA from the Paris Agreement.

We have noted the widespread commitment to tackling climate change in the party manifestos. While there is some diversity in the approaches, there are many common factors. Hence, as a priority, we urge strong support for:

• Home energy conservation programmes. These will both reduce carbon emissions and help to tackle fuel poverty, which is estimated to be responsible for nearly 8,000 UK deaths a year. [1]

• Renewable energy projects – especially wind, solar, marine and biogas technologies and community-led projects. With costs for many of these falling rapidly, the potential economic and employment benefits are very large [2] – and government opinion polling shows these technologies are especially popular. [3]

 

• Energy storage technologies, including batteries, power-to-gas systems, and pumped hydro storage. Many of these technologies are already rapidly falling in cost, and they have enormous potential to complement the variable renewable energy sources. [4] Electric vehicles will play a key role here and their widespread adoption will help to reduce the number of UK deaths attributable to outdoor air pollution, currently estimated at 40,000 per year. [5]

  Additional Recommendations:

We further recommend the following additional actions, which we strongly

believe will complement those above:

• End subsidies for fossil fuels, especially for unconventional sources like shale gas. The growth of a large-scale shale gas industry in this country is likely to seriously undermine Britain’s climate targets, as the Committee on Climate Change has warned. [6] Furthermore, the technique of hydraulic fracturing (or ‘fracking’) is not popular with the British public, [7] partly as it creates significant risks for the local environment.

 

• End new commitments to nuclear power stations. These create unique and unresolved economic, security, environmental and safety risks.

 

Finally, we urge you to use any political influence you have in the USA to try to convince President Trump that climate change is a serious threat to his country as well as the world, and that his government needs to change course. Indeed, his failure to support cleaner industries in his own country is very likely to have a negative impact on the economy there.

We would be interested to hear your thoughts on our recommendations.

Yours sincerely

 

These Authors

Dr Stuart Parkinson is Executive Director and Dr Philip Webber

is Chair of Scientists for Global Responsibility

 

This open letter has been sent to the following politicians:

Theresa May MP, Conservative Party

Jeremy Corbyn MP, Labour Party

Tim Farron MP, Liberal Democrats

Nicola Sturgeon MSP, Scottish National Party

Arlene Forster MLA, Democratic Unionist Party

Michelle O’Brien MLA, Sinn Fein

Leanne Wood AM, Plaid Cymru

Caroline Lucas MP, Green Party

 

References

1. Energy Bill Revolution (2015). Fuel poverty.

Energy Bill Revolution

2. REN21 (2017). Renewables 2017 Global Status Report.

Renewables Global Staus Report

3. BEIS (2017). Energy and Climate Change Public Attitudes Tracker.

Energy & Climate Change Public Attitudes

4. Goodall C (2016). The Switch: How solar, storage and new tech means cheap

power for all. Profile Books.

5. Royal College of Physicians et al (2016). Every breath we take: the

lifelong impact of air pollution.

Impact of Air Pollution

6. Committee on Climate Change (2016). The compatibility of UK onshore

petroleum with meeting the UK’s carbon budgets.

Meeting UK Carbon Budgets

 

 

Drawing is one of life’s intangible small pleasures. Like the slow process of uncorking a wine bottle or wet shaving with a bristle and razor, there’s very little to it, but the simple action is, well, just very satisfying. While sketching, the use of tried-and-tested, low-tech tools combined with the chance to stare at things a bit longer than we normally would, is what lifts us. Add the bonus of producing artwork that also gives happiness to others and it becomes clearer to see why drawing is coming back into fashion.

The Drawing Society is reflecting this surge in interest with an exhibition of beautiful work at the Bankside Gallery, London from 6-18 June. The Society of Graphic Fine Art, as the Drawing Society is now known, was set up in 1919 to promote the talents of draughtsmanship in all its forms. Its members’ latest work embraces this aim with artists skilfully and thoughtfully showing off their ability to draw, paint and create.

In its purist form, drawing is marking down the junctions of observed lines. The ecology movement does the same thing, joining up the dots of our under-strain, but interlinked environment to create forceful arguments. I believe the SGFA is the perfect home for expressing environmental concerns through pencil and paint. My works on show are studies of extinct, but now re-introduced Large Blue butterflies. The paintings explain the incredibly convoluted life cycle of one of our most alluring insects, now breeding again in pockets of chalky English countryside.

It’s not a surprise to see the natural world featuring so prominently on the South Bank. Many of the 85 artists aim to capture the environment on paper. Tamlyn Blasdale-Holmes’s hypnotic knot work draws you in to an intricate and intriguing world. He says “For a number of years I worked in conservation and this grew my interest in drawing pieces with strong animal and human rights subjects. Because of the gravity of some of the issues I tackle I often add a glint of wry humour in the hope that this will lighten but reinforce my message.”

Louisa Crispin creates delicately detailed studies of bees and plants. She is entranced by the cycle of growth and decay. She’s says “It’s quiet in my studio and distanced from the world. I try to look ever closer at plants, insects and birds.” Her work captures texture, shadows, silhouettes and movement with carefully-observed marks and tone.

Plant life also features in Beginnings Venetia Norris’s hand finished lithographic print. As part of the printing process Norris draws on limestone. She explains “Everything living has an individual shape and form, everything makes it’s presence felt in some way, leaves a mark, some trace. Using just the tip of my pencil, graphite and ink I try to reveal the intricate layers, the sensuous interiors, the infinite variety and texture of a leaf, a stem, or a petal.”

Susan Poole’s work is crafted from her academic fine art and archaeological background. In her work on show she says: “The form, colour and surface texture of animals I study embody particular personal meaning to me, layers of which might be uncovered like archaeological strata.”

After training as a painter in the 1960s Myrtle Pizzey’s printmaking now seems to her like an extension of the process of observing and recording. “The tactile task of cutting a relief block holds great appeal. It helps to clarify my own thoughts and responses to the process. Before I draw and record my surroundings in Somerset, I have observed the area at different times of day in various climatic conditions over a year or more. The process of creating a print from conception to realization may take three or four months.”

Next door to Bankside in Tate Modern, installations, film and sculpture may be the current darlings, but even the most challenging of contemporary art is born in a well-thumbed sketchbook. In our digital-saturated lives many yearn for more of the simple marking of pencil and paint on paper. As we’ve found all over the world, our ancestors 40,000 years ago liked to paint in caves. Drawing has never really gone away and I urge you to see some of the finest examples of the practice still going on, but in the more comfortable Bankside gallery

The free Bankside Biennial SGFA exhibition is open from 11am-6pm from 6-18 June. www.sgfa.org.uk www.banksidegallery.com

This Author

Gary Cook is a Conservation Artist and Arts Editor for the Ecologist. More on his work and how to contact him here:

My Antarctic diary published in The Ecologist

 Online: cookthepainter.com

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