The five-part miniseries Chernobyl has become the popular television phenomenon of the year, and one of the most critically successful ever. Over thirty years since the explosion at the core of a nuclear reactor in 1986, the production has been praised for its fidelity both to the events around the disaster and to the look and feel of the Soviet 1980s.

This article first appeared at We Are The Mutants. 

This has in turn prompted a backlash, from critics admiring the strength of its drama but questioning its faithfulness to historical fact. Meanwhile, Russia has announced plans for its own patriotic version of events. This debate, however, gets us no further in understanding the unique power of the series, which indeed lies in its vision of how reality is made up of hidden physical and political forces.

Read: Chernobyl: a ‘debt to the truth’

It also offers an example of why historical drama should not be judged by the criterion of historical accuracy alone. What one can learn from War and Peace about 19th century Europe, for example, doesn’t depend on whether its protagonists’ conversations actually took place—and if facts are sacred, then so too is art. 

Daring drama

Chernobyl’s large themes—of knowledge, authority, human happiness and its relationship to nature—can only be understood if we appreciate the series as a creative evocation of a special kind of horror.

It is worth starting then by saying that, artistically, Chernobyl is deliberately, ostentatiously dull. The dark browns and greys of the décor and costumes are already behind the times for the setting. The principal characters are present not because of their personalities but for their professional and institutional roles, and the drama is mostly made up of nuclear scientists explaining policy changes to bureaucrats.

The dramatic tension relies on problem solving and the unfolding of procedure, without any melodramatic rescue attempts and few pyrotechnics of collapse and mayhem. We only see the main explosion from afar, or in partial glimpses.

The series begins instead two years later, with the suicide of a middle-aged man in a darkened flat. During the course of the drama we learn nothing of his family life, his hopes or his past, but for a few indirect comments in the final scene implicating him in crimes that deny him easy status as a good guy.

As mainstream television, Chernobyl is daring drama, opting to be more of a visual damp squib than a fireworks display. It focuses less on the clamor of mayhem than the quietly enveloping deadliness in its wake. Its approach resembles what the Russian dramatist Chekhov called “undramatic drama,” where the real tragedies of life lie otherwise unrecognized beneath banal appearances.

Disaster operation

This attitude grants Chernobyl a tremendous sense of realism, of appearing simply to be “what really happened.” Yet even the banal appearances are artistically meaningful. The setting is portrayed as separate from nature. The fading pattern wallpaper and mass-produced ‘80s gear on which the camera lingers show the very fabric of life to be synthetic, inorganic, artificial.

The lighting scheme of sickly yellows and greens lacks vitality, and the environment progressively becomes an industrial wasteland. The scrupulous retro evocation indicates the death of a certain post-war vision of mass society, a death rendered uncannily attractive, its visual appeal not unlike the terrible beauty of the burning reactor that people fatally flock to see on the night of the explosion.

Thus, in the guise of costume drama, Chernobyl resurrects a premise common to sci-fi: the inability of society to deal with its own technological advancement. This premise is realized with a tact all the more effective for its understatement.

The sun rises at the end of the first episode on a pleasant late spring day in Pripyat, the densely-populated town near the reactor, the morning after the accident. A group of anonymous schoolchildren skip past towards school, but the camera remains still. Behind them, a bird drops unnoticed from the sky, disheveled, bloodshot, its talons clutching at the air as it gasps its final breath, the first victim of a pervasive contamination.

The series’ employment of understatement is not intended to reduce the horrific nature of the accident, but to heighten its impact, communicating the artistic point that beneath banal appearances, normality has turned into a toxic graveyard.

The exposure of the reactor core, whose glowing stream of light shoots directly to the heavens, achieves what Mark Fisher defined as the “weird” in fantasy literature—that is, the opening of a gateway from normality into a different dimension. This dimension is evoked in Chernobyl not by spectacular effects but suggestion, because the drama’s full force exists beyond the capacities of direct representation. Professor Legasov (Jared Harris), the scientist who ends up heading the disaster operation, alerts the first meeting of the Central Committee of the USSR to the kinds of magnitude involved by explaining that:

… Every atom of U235 is like a speeding bullet, traveling at nearly the speed of light, penetrating everything in its path… every gram of U235 holds over a billion, trillion of these bullets – that’s in one gram. Now Chernobyl holds over three million grams, and right now it’s on fire… That’s 3 million, billion, trillion bullets, in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Most of these bullets will not stop firing for 100 years. Some of them not for 50,000 years.

Elemental forces

These are precise numbers, but their continual multiplication into ever greater units of measurement has the effect of evoking the infinite. The series manages to imagine the scale of a catastrophe the likes of which “has never occurred on this planet before.”

Byelorussian physicist Khomyuk (a fictional character, played by Emily Watson, devised as a tribute to the many scientists who helped investigate the accident) explains to a reconvened Central Committee that the rescue operation risks causing meltdown within two days—a meltdown that “will instantly superheat and vaporize approximately 7,000 cubic meters of water, causing a significant thermal explosion… [of] between 2 and 4 megatons,” dispersing all the radioactive material by a massive shockwave that will render Eastern Europe “completely uninhabitable for nearly 100 years.” This horror touches the sublime—it allows us to imagine the unimaginable, a destructive power beyond the comprehension of those who created it.

The fourth episode begins with a soldier undertaking the belated evacuation operation. He instructs a woman milking a cow to leave her farm. She tells him she is 82, and he is not the first boy with a gun to tell her to leave: she was there after the Revolution in 1917 when the Bolsheviks told her to leave, there during Stalin and the famine, and there in the Great War when the Nazis came.

Her life is that of the Eastern European 20th century, and she refuses to leave now “because of something I cannot see at all.” The soldier shoots her cow and orders her into the departing trucks. The same episode ends with a woman in a maternity ward. Her husband, a firefighter, was among the first to tend to the flames at the reactor and has died a slow death from radiation poisoning. Her child lives for only four hours, a victim of radiation passed on while she tended to her husband’s agonies. The catastrophe has breached the familiar order of time, uprooting history and contaminating the future.

As the clean-up operation gets underway, Legasov remarks that “the atom is a humbling thing.” A military commander next to him responds: “It’s not humbling, it’s humiliating.” Their choice of remarks indicates two different concerns. To be humbled is to recognize humanity’s insignificance in confrontation with the elemental forces of the universe, but humiliation refers to the impotence of a political structure built on claims of civilizational supremacy.

Sublime force

The malfunctioning of the reactor not only opens a gateway into the sublime, but also exposes a malfunction in the Soviet state itself, or rather a flaw inherent in the initial design: the disaster was caused by cost cutting, arbitrary production quotas, the priority of management authority over expert opinion, and the political inconvenience of truth. It is misplaced faith in this system—the reactor and Soviet authority cannot be wrong—that leads the people into catastrophe.

Horror often works by tapping into the irrational sides of our nature: fear of the unknown, paranoia, superstition. Chernobyl is instead what we might call a rational horror, emerging from the dawning awareness of an awful reality shorn of the comforting illusions that usually sustain us. The nuclear engineers took what they thought they knew for granted—that safety systems were in place to prevent an RBMK reactor from exploding—and suppressed the evidence of their own eyes, even after the explosion occurred.

The five hours of the series provide this slow process of gathering realization. Unexplained chunks of technical detail take up large parts of dialogue, whose meaning only becomes clear maybe 20 or 30 minutes of screen time later, or even several episodes later. The predominant mood is one of dread, the soundtrack by Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir made up of the low, scraping drones of an actual nuclear power plant mixed in with a string section, the whole sounding like an extended groan emanating from an inhuman depth.

Only in the last episode do we get to the beginning, the cause of the explosion. The climax is reconstructed out of chronological order and executed with meticulous precision, providing retrospective awareness of a calamitous catalog of error. It is the culmination of a highly sophisticated story structure, intercut between the fateful events of the day of the accident and Legasov’s expert (and markedly low-fi) courtroom testimony a year later.

This virtuoso resolution is astonishing drama, and an example of what it praises—the ability of the human intellect to connect disparate elements into a complex mechanism, in the case of both storytelling and nuclear science. It is a testament to reason against the hostile power of perverted political authority and the sublime force of nuclear energy.

Apparently invincible

When Khomyuk is placed in jail for taking her investigation too far, Legasov describes her mission to find the truth an irresistible urge to “problem solving.” This humanist commitment to reason ennobles the viewer, for problem solving is exactly what we experience in watching it, linking us in however small a way to the sacrifices of those who succeeded in averting meltdown.

The end credits play over the sound of quasi-sacred choral strains: it is telling that the consequences of the most sophisticated science on the planet, nuclear physics, can find appropriate description only in the ancient Biblical imagery of Armageddon.

Despite its faith in reason, the show retains its wonder at what Legasov calls the beauty of “the invisible dance that powers entire cities without smoke or flame.” As for the more earthbound concerns, there is no real closure, just abandonment: of the nuclear plant, of Soviet socialism, of the millions of people whose lives were changed. The reactor is buried alive, interred within a thick blanket of concrete in a tomb that is monument to its everlasting toxic energy.

For the characters of Chernobyl, the terrors of Stalinism were still in living memory, the accident closer historically to the launch of Sputnik 1 than to today. They remind us that Soviet society was once powered by not only totalitarian suppression of the truth, but also a commitment to continual human advancement. The series provides a warning against collectively willed delusions, and the self-assurance that is all too common to justifications of political authority.

The truth requires breaking with deference to accepted belief, to seek a new way of thinking. As Karl Marx himself pointed out, if there were no difference between essence and appearance, there would be no need for science. Certain horrors may be hidden within everyday reality; in the impenetrable core of a reactor, a fury may reside; and within the body politic a fatal illness may already have taken hold. Despite their appearance of health, our protagonists will be dead within five years, the same time, unbeknownst to any of them, that will lapse before the apparently invincible USSR expires.

Authoritarian repression

The debate around Chernobyl brings to mind the truth that in both science and art, we can only make sense of reality if we interpret it creatively. Legasov’s final recorded testimony states his faith in the greatest power humans can access, the ability to search for truth, which, however hidden it may be, “doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies or our religions.”

Some may find this hypocritical, given the series’ own employment of artistry. The grand humanistic themes of power, knowledge, and beauty play out through its incorporation of disaster movie tropes, sci-fi, spy thriller, body horror, period piece, and courtroom and procedural drama. As a whole, the compelling narrative exposes the possibility that the appearances we take for granted may be little more than complacent lies.

Many other tales of nuclear disaster work by imagining the dystopia that beckons after nuclear winter. The Japanese responded to the atom bomb by inventing Godzilla, a monstrous being summoned from deep within the prehistoric past. But Chernobyl demands that we look to the everyday of our present reality for the sources of the horror. Some critics claim that the series trumpets Cold War triumphalism, that the moral of the story is the West’s simple victory over Communism.

But this ignores the drama’s relevance to a deeply troubling reality of our own. While it is hard to remember the faith in state socialism that allowed the bureaucratic mismanagement behind the catastrophe, it is also hard to imagine that we could now rectify an error of a similar scale. However reluctantly and belatedly, the series shows how a meltdown was averted by the eventual mobilization of the full machinery of the state, and the selfless devotion of so many anonymous martyrs to put it right.

If the climate crisis offers a clue to the contemporary response to emergency, our species seems prepared to pass up its final opportunity to save itself from extinction. Multimillion dollar industries are devoted to denying the science and lobbying for cosmetic fixes whose purpose is to ignore the necessity of vital change, and the state has retreated from its responsibility of welfare for all. Modern democracies can produce far more consummate ways of suppressing inconvenient truths than the blunt methods of authoritarian repression. The horror thus remains, ever in the midst of our normality.

This Author

Louis Bayman is a writer and researcher in film and popular culture. He lectures in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, and has published various books, articles, and chapters on topics including Italian cinema, retro and nostalgia, melodrama, horror, and serial killer cinema. He is also the Culture Editor (Film) for The Platform.

This article first appeared at We Are The Mutants. 

Agriculture has been the bedrock of human civilisation since 7000BC. There’s not a society on the planet that hasn’t been built around it.

But today the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that cutting carbon emissions from transport and energy usage is not enough to tackle climate change.

In order to prevent the earth from heating to dangerous levels – 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels – we need to substantially change agriculture and land-usage.

Three problems

So when did agriculture – something we can’t picture life without – become such a problem? There’s three crucial points.

One was when we started to use “cheap” fossil fuels to replace human labour, ingenuity and working with nature. So now, it takes 10 calories of inputs to produce one of food. Once, not so long ago, it was one in to three out.

That was the second change – the introduction of huge volumes of herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Hedges that has housed the predators of pests were grubbed up, ponds filled in, “weeds” eliminated to the point of absolute monoculture.

Finally, there was the shift to most “food” coming through supermarkets and multinational companies, which wanted uniform sizes and shapes, and tastes, around the world. So crops were wedged into unsuitable environments, just to feed multinational companies that wanted uniform products around the world.

When I visit the supermarket I am dumbfounded that products which are organic, free-range, palm-oil free or grass-fed are demarcated on stickers.

Environmentally chaotic

Whereas products which wreak havoc on biodiversity, come from land that was recently rainforest, that are intensively farmed and waste tonnes of water, are not stickered. These are the defaults.

We are subtly led to expect agriculture to be intensive, unsustainable, cruel, water-thirsty and environmentally chaotic unless a little sticker (and often a higher price tag) tells us otherwise.

If anything embodies what we’ve been led to believe is the norm, it is intensive animal farming. The IPCC emphasises a truth which has been known for years – yet met with general inertia from global leaders – that a rapid global shift to plant-based diets is necessary for human survival.

What the report makes clear is that farmed food which we could eat is wasted on feeding animals for slaughter. For every 100 calories fed to farm animals, between 15 and 30 calories make it into our stomachs as meat.

But no matter what food we buy – whether it is animal or plant – we are wasting far too much of it. Over a quarter of food that makes it past the farm door doesn’t end up in our stomachs.

Waste

Seventy percent of food is wasted by households – that equates to over 6 tonnes a year. The average household with children is spending £700 a year on food that ends up in the bin.

The land and water used in producing this food? Utterly wasted.  Whether it is by filtering it through animals for meat, or by throwing unused food into landfills – it is clear that we are producing far more food than we need.

In a climate emergency, wasting food, water and land at the rate we are currently going is unthinkable.

And yet food waste and land usage seem don’t seem to be very high on the agendas of world leaders. The IPCC report stresses that we are running out of time.

Whilst we sort our banana peels and egg shells into our composting heap, and carefully store our leftovers to eat later, farms are often forced by the purchasers of their crops to waste enough fruit and veg to feed Birmingham for a year.

Climate emergency 

UK households  binned £13 billion of edible food in 2017. Individual responsibility cannot be ignored, but looking into supermarkets, it is easy to see that responsibility is shared.

BOGOF (buy one get one free) encourages overpurchasing. Fruit and vegetable comes packaged in ways that makes buying just what you need impossible. Rampant confusion still reigns over “use by” and “best by” dates.

And a look at the ready meals, the promotions, the “luxury” ranges, show how much meat is still presented as the centre-piece of meals.

In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?… If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is?”

It is a question that is hard to answer, but one which all ecologists and environmentalists need to consider. We are in a climate emergency and our relationship with what we eat and how we farm it needs to change. Our window of time to be indifferent is up.

This Author 

Amelia Womack is deputy leader of the Green Party. 

Agriculture has been the bedrock of human civilisation since 7000BC. There’s not a society on the planet that hasn’t been built around it.

But today the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that cutting carbon emissions from transport and energy usage is not enough to tackle climate change.

In order to prevent the earth from heating to dangerous levels – 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels – we need to substantially change agriculture and land-usage.

Three problems

So when did agriculture – something we can’t picture life without – become such a problem? There’s three crucial points.

One was when we started to use “cheap” fossil fuels to replace human labour, ingenuity and working with nature. So now, it takes 10 calories of inputs to produce one of food. Once, not so long ago, it was one in to three out.

That was the second change – the introduction of huge volumes of herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Hedges that has housed the predators of pests were grubbed up, ponds filled in, “weeds” eliminated to the point of absolute monoculture.

Finally, there was the shift to most “food” coming through supermarkets and multinational companies, which wanted uniform sizes and shapes, and tastes, around the world. So crops were wedged into unsuitable environments, just to feed multinational companies that wanted uniform products around the world.

When I visit the supermarket I am dumbfounded that products which are organic, free-range, palm-oil free or grass-fed are demarcated on stickers.

Environmentally chaotic

Whereas products which wreak havoc on biodiversity, come from land that was recently rainforest, that are intensively farmed and waste tonnes of water, are not stickered. These are the defaults.

We are subtly led to expect agriculture to be intensive, unsustainable, cruel, water-thirsty and environmentally chaotic unless a little sticker (and often a higher price tag) tells us otherwise.

If anything embodies what we’ve been led to believe is the norm, it is intensive animal farming. The IPCC emphasises a truth which has been known for years – yet met with general inertia from global leaders – that a rapid global shift to plant-based diets is necessary for human survival.

What the report makes clear is that farmed food which we could eat is wasted on feeding animals for slaughter. For every 100 calories fed to farm animals, between 15 and 30 calories make it into our stomachs as meat.

But no matter what food we buy – whether it is animal or plant – we are wasting far too much of it. Over a quarter of food that makes it past the farm door doesn’t end up in our stomachs.

Waste

Seventy percent of food is wasted by households – that equates to over 6 tonnes a year. The average household with children is spending £700 a year on food that ends up in the bin.

The land and water used in producing this food? Utterly wasted.  Whether it is by filtering it through animals for meat, or by throwing unused food into landfills – it is clear that we are producing far more food than we need.

In a climate emergency, wasting food, water and land at the rate we are currently going is unthinkable.

And yet food waste and land usage seem don’t seem to be very high on the agendas of world leaders. The IPCC report stresses that we are running out of time.

Whilst we sort our banana peels and egg shells into our composting heap, and carefully store our leftovers to eat later, farms are often forced by the purchasers of their crops to waste enough fruit and veg to feed Birmingham for a year.

Climate emergency 

UK households  binned £13 billion of edible food in 2017. Individual responsibility cannot be ignored, but looking into supermarkets, it is easy to see that responsibility is shared.

BOGOF (buy one get one free) encourages overpurchasing. Fruit and vegetable comes packaged in ways that makes buying just what you need impossible. Rampant confusion still reigns over “use by” and “best by” dates.

And a look at the ready meals, the promotions, the “luxury” ranges, show how much meat is still presented as the centre-piece of meals.

In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?… If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is?”

It is a question that is hard to answer, but one which all ecologists and environmentalists need to consider. We are in a climate emergency and our relationship with what we eat and how we farm it needs to change. Our window of time to be indifferent is up.

This Author 

Amelia Womack is deputy leader of the Green Party. 

Agriculture has been the bedrock of human civilisation since 7000BC. There’s not a society on the planet that hasn’t been built around it.

But today the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that cutting carbon emissions from transport and energy usage is not enough to tackle climate change.

In order to prevent the earth from heating to dangerous levels – 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels – we need to substantially change agriculture and land-usage.

Three problems

So when did agriculture – something we can’t picture life without – become such a problem? There’s three crucial points.

One was when we started to use “cheap” fossil fuels to replace human labour, ingenuity and working with nature. So now, it takes 10 calories of inputs to produce one of food. Once, not so long ago, it was one in to three out.

That was the second change – the introduction of huge volumes of herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Hedges that has housed the predators of pests were grubbed up, ponds filled in, “weeds” eliminated to the point of absolute monoculture.

Finally, there was the shift to most “food” coming through supermarkets and multinational companies, which wanted uniform sizes and shapes, and tastes, around the world. So crops were wedged into unsuitable environments, just to feed multinational companies that wanted uniform products around the world.

When I visit the supermarket I am dumbfounded that products which are organic, free-range, palm-oil free or grass-fed are demarcated on stickers.

Environmentally chaotic

Whereas products which wreak havoc on biodiversity, come from land that was recently rainforest, that are intensively farmed and waste tonnes of water, are not stickered. These are the defaults.

We are subtly led to expect agriculture to be intensive, unsustainable, cruel, water-thirsty and environmentally chaotic unless a little sticker (and often a higher price tag) tells us otherwise.

If anything embodies what we’ve been led to believe is the norm, it is intensive animal farming. The IPCC emphasises a truth which has been known for years – yet met with general inertia from global leaders – that a rapid global shift to plant-based diets is necessary for human survival.

What the report makes clear is that farmed food which we could eat is wasted on feeding animals for slaughter. For every 100 calories fed to farm animals, between 15 and 30 calories make it into our stomachs as meat.

But no matter what food we buy – whether it is animal or plant – we are wasting far too much of it. Over a quarter of food that makes it past the farm door doesn’t end up in our stomachs.

Waste

Seventy percent of food is wasted by households – that equates to over 6 tonnes a year. The average household with children is spending £700 a year on food that ends up in the bin.

The land and water used in producing this food? Utterly wasted.  Whether it is by filtering it through animals for meat, or by throwing unused food into landfills – it is clear that we are producing far more food than we need.

In a climate emergency, wasting food, water and land at the rate we are currently going is unthinkable.

And yet food waste and land usage seem don’t seem to be very high on the agendas of world leaders. The IPCC report stresses that we are running out of time.

Whilst we sort our banana peels and egg shells into our composting heap, and carefully store our leftovers to eat later, farms are often forced by the purchasers of their crops to waste enough fruit and veg to feed Birmingham for a year.

Climate emergency 

UK households  binned £13 billion of edible food in 2017. Individual responsibility cannot be ignored, but looking into supermarkets, it is easy to see that responsibility is shared.

BOGOF (buy one get one free) encourages overpurchasing. Fruit and vegetable comes packaged in ways that makes buying just what you need impossible. Rampant confusion still reigns over “use by” and “best by” dates.

And a look at the ready meals, the promotions, the “luxury” ranges, show how much meat is still presented as the centre-piece of meals.

In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?… If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is?”

It is a question that is hard to answer, but one which all ecologists and environmentalists need to consider. We are in a climate emergency and our relationship with what we eat and how we farm it needs to change. Our window of time to be indifferent is up.

This Author 

Amelia Womack is deputy leader of the Green Party. 

Agriculture has been the bedrock of human civilisation since 7000BC. There’s not a society on the planet that hasn’t been built around it.

But today the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that cutting carbon emissions from transport and energy usage is not enough to tackle climate change.

In order to prevent the earth from heating to dangerous levels – 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels – we need to substantially change agriculture and land-usage.

Three problems

So when did agriculture – something we can’t picture life without – become such a problem? There’s three crucial points.

One was when we started to use “cheap” fossil fuels to replace human labour, ingenuity and working with nature. So now, it takes 10 calories of inputs to produce one of food. Once, not so long ago, it was one in to three out.

That was the second change – the introduction of huge volumes of herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Hedges that has housed the predators of pests were grubbed up, ponds filled in, “weeds” eliminated to the point of absolute monoculture.

Finally, there was the shift to most “food” coming through supermarkets and multinational companies, which wanted uniform sizes and shapes, and tastes, around the world. So crops were wedged into unsuitable environments, just to feed multinational companies that wanted uniform products around the world.

When I visit the supermarket I am dumbfounded that products which are organic, free-range, palm-oil free or grass-fed are demarcated on stickers.

Environmentally chaotic

Whereas products which wreak havoc on biodiversity, come from land that was recently rainforest, that are intensively farmed and waste tonnes of water, are not stickered. These are the defaults.

We are subtly led to expect agriculture to be intensive, unsustainable, cruel, water-thirsty and environmentally chaotic unless a little sticker (and often a higher price tag) tells us otherwise.

If anything embodies what we’ve been led to believe is the norm, it is intensive animal farming. The IPCC emphasises a truth which has been known for years – yet met with general inertia from global leaders – that a rapid global shift to plant-based diets is necessary for human survival.

What the report makes clear is that farmed food which we could eat is wasted on feeding animals for slaughter. For every 100 calories fed to farm animals, between 15 and 30 calories make it into our stomachs as meat.

But no matter what food we buy – whether it is animal or plant – we are wasting far too much of it. Over a quarter of food that makes it past the farm door doesn’t end up in our stomachs.

Waste

Seventy percent of food is wasted by households – that equates to over 6 tonnes a year. The average household with children is spending £700 a year on food that ends up in the bin.

The land and water used in producing this food? Utterly wasted.  Whether it is by filtering it through animals for meat, or by throwing unused food into landfills – it is clear that we are producing far more food than we need.

In a climate emergency, wasting food, water and land at the rate we are currently going is unthinkable.

And yet food waste and land usage seem don’t seem to be very high on the agendas of world leaders. The IPCC report stresses that we are running out of time.

Whilst we sort our banana peels and egg shells into our composting heap, and carefully store our leftovers to eat later, farms are often forced by the purchasers of their crops to waste enough fruit and veg to feed Birmingham for a year.

Climate emergency 

UK households  binned £13 billion of edible food in 2017. Individual responsibility cannot be ignored, but looking into supermarkets, it is easy to see that responsibility is shared.

BOGOF (buy one get one free) encourages overpurchasing. Fruit and vegetable comes packaged in ways that makes buying just what you need impossible. Rampant confusion still reigns over “use by” and “best by” dates.

And a look at the ready meals, the promotions, the “luxury” ranges, show how much meat is still presented as the centre-piece of meals.

In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?… If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is?”

It is a question that is hard to answer, but one which all ecologists and environmentalists need to consider. We are in a climate emergency and our relationship with what we eat and how we farm it needs to change. Our window of time to be indifferent is up.

This Author 

Amelia Womack is deputy leader of the Green Party. 

Agriculture has been the bedrock of human civilisation since 7000BC. There’s not a society on the planet that hasn’t been built around it.

But today the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes that cutting carbon emissions from transport and energy usage is not enough to tackle climate change.

In order to prevent the earth from heating to dangerous levels – 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels – we need to substantially change agriculture and land-usage.

Three problems

So when did agriculture – something we can’t picture life without – become such a problem? There’s three crucial points.

One was when we started to use “cheap” fossil fuels to replace human labour, ingenuity and working with nature. So now, it takes 10 calories of inputs to produce one of food. Once, not so long ago, it was one in to three out.

That was the second change – the introduction of huge volumes of herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Hedges that has housed the predators of pests were grubbed up, ponds filled in, “weeds” eliminated to the point of absolute monoculture.

Finally, there was the shift to most “food” coming through supermarkets and multinational companies, which wanted uniform sizes and shapes, and tastes, around the world. So crops were wedged into unsuitable environments, just to feed multinational companies that wanted uniform products around the world.

When I visit the supermarket I am dumbfounded that products which are organic, free-range, palm-oil free or grass-fed are demarcated on stickers.

Environmentally chaotic

Whereas products which wreak havoc on biodiversity, come from land that was recently rainforest, that are intensively farmed and waste tonnes of water, are not stickered. These are the defaults.

We are subtly led to expect agriculture to be intensive, unsustainable, cruel, water-thirsty and environmentally chaotic unless a little sticker (and often a higher price tag) tells us otherwise.

If anything embodies what we’ve been led to believe is the norm, it is intensive animal farming. The IPCC emphasises a truth which has been known for years – yet met with general inertia from global leaders – that a rapid global shift to plant-based diets is necessary for human survival.

What the report makes clear is that farmed food which we could eat is wasted on feeding animals for slaughter. For every 100 calories fed to farm animals, between 15 and 30 calories make it into our stomachs as meat.

But no matter what food we buy – whether it is animal or plant – we are wasting far too much of it. Over a quarter of food that makes it past the farm door doesn’t end up in our stomachs.

Waste

Seventy percent of food is wasted by households – that equates to over 6 tonnes a year. The average household with children is spending £700 a year on food that ends up in the bin.

The land and water used in producing this food? Utterly wasted.  Whether it is by filtering it through animals for meat, or by throwing unused food into landfills – it is clear that we are producing far more food than we need.

In a climate emergency, wasting food, water and land at the rate we are currently going is unthinkable.

And yet food waste and land usage seem don’t seem to be very high on the agendas of world leaders. The IPCC report stresses that we are running out of time.

Whilst we sort our banana peels and egg shells into our composting heap, and carefully store our leftovers to eat later, farms are often forced by the purchasers of their crops to waste enough fruit and veg to feed Birmingham for a year.

Climate emergency 

UK households  binned £13 billion of edible food in 2017. Individual responsibility cannot be ignored, but looking into supermarkets, it is easy to see that responsibility is shared.

BOGOF (buy one get one free) encourages overpurchasing. Fruit and vegetable comes packaged in ways that makes buying just what you need impossible. Rampant confusion still reigns over “use by” and “best by” dates.

And a look at the ready meals, the promotions, the “luxury” ranges, show how much meat is still presented as the centre-piece of meals.

In his book Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer writes, “Just how destructive does a culinary preference have to be before we decide to eat something else?… If being the number one contributor to the most serious threat facing the planet (global warming) isn’t enough, what is?”

It is a question that is hard to answer, but one which all ecologists and environmentalists need to consider. We are in a climate emergency and our relationship with what we eat and how we farm it needs to change. Our window of time to be indifferent is up.

This Author 

Amelia Womack is deputy leader of the Green Party. 

The world must “look after the land” to help tackle climate change, experts warn as rising temperatures put food supplies at risk.

Global warming will increasingly lead to extremes such as drought, heatwaves and wildfires and threaten food security, reducing yields, pushing up food prices and disrupting supply chains, a new UN report said.

But sustainable farming, changing diets to eat less meat, replanting forests and protecting habitats such as peatland and mangroves can cut climate emissions and deliver other benefits such as securing food supplies.

Swift

Land is already under pressure, with around 70 percent of the world’s ice-free land affected by human activity – and climate change is driving more problems such as turning land to desert, and soil and coastal erosion, the study said.

How people use the land is also contributing to global warming – with activities such as growing crops, raising livestock and cutting down forests accounting for almost a quarter of greenhouse gases (23%) between 2006 and 2017.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) comes after a study from the international body last year called for “unprecedented” action to slash carbon emissions to zero by 2050 and limit dangerous global warming.

Experts behind the new report called for swift action to protect land to curb emissions, help nature and ensure food security.

Dr Jo House, from the University of Bristol, said: “We have to look after the land, the land is doing many things for us and we need to support the land for it to continue to do that.”

Lentils

Professor Jim Skea, from Imperial College London, said: “The human race has been rather abusing it and we need to look after it for our own benefit as well.

“Land is already struggling under pressures we put on it at the moment. The issue is climate change is adding to all the other burdens we put on the land system.”

And he said: “There’s a lot of actions that can be taken for the land sector to help with climate change, there are many ways of managing it to reduce the impacts of land and bring benefits like building up soil carbon.”

He added: “In the past we’ve often thought dealing with climate change is about renewable energy and energy efficiency, but this is bringing land much more into the foreground.”

The report said balanced diets with plant-based foods such as grains, beans and lentils, nuts, fruits and vegetables and animal-based food produced in sustainable systems with low greenhouse gas emissions can help curb climate change and benefit health.

Wasted

Dr House said it was not up to scientists to tell people what to do.

But she said red meat had a much higher carbon impact than other types of meat due to the emissions given off during production as well as clearing land to grow animal feed.

The report said around 13% of carbon dioxide between 2007 and 2016 was caused by human uses of land, mostly from cutting down forests.

Land also accounted for 44% of methane emissions, with livestock such as cattle and expansion of rice paddies driving rising levels of the gas, and 82% of nitrous oxide emissions, coming from fertilisers for crops and from livestock.

At the same time, around 25-30 percent of all food produced is lost or wasted, contributing more greenhouse gases, the report by experts from around the world found.

Slashed

Sustainable food production, improved forest management, protecting soils, conserving habitats and restoring land, reducing deforestation and food loss and waste can all tackle climate change, help wildlife and boost livelihoods.

Conserving peatlands, wetlands, grasslands, mangroves and forests can have an immediate impact.

Other measures could include replanting forests and using more trees as part of farms in “agroforestry”, for example for shading livestock or as crops such as apples which could be planted through the middle of fields of other crops.

But the experts warned that planting monocultures of trees or crops for bioenergy on a large scale in an unsustainable way will have negative impacts, and sufficient land must be available to grow food.

They also warn that tackling emissions from land is not on its own enough to curb climate change, and greenhouse gases must be slashed from all sectors to keep global warming to well below 2C or 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

Climate change could cause an increase in toxic mercury in seafood such as cod and tuna as warmer waters force them to eat more to keep going, scientists have warned.

Around four-fifths of the mercury put into the atmosphere from natural and human causes, such as burning coal, ends up in the ocean where some is converted by tiny organisms to a particularly dangerous form known as methylmercury.

This methylmercury, which can affect brain function, works its way up the food chain and accumulates in top predators such as cod and tuna in high concentrations.

Cod

As the seas warm, these fish are using more energy to swim which requires more calories – so they are eating more and storing up more of the toxin.

This means that while regulation to curb emissions of mercury are leading to decreases in the concentrations of the toxin in fish, rising ocean temperatures due to climate change are predicted to push it up again, the researchers from Harvard warn.

Changes in the diet of species including cod and spiny dogfish as a result of overfishing of their food sources such as herring can also affect how much methylmercury they are consuming and storing in their bodies.

The researchers from Harvard John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health modelled the impacts of reductions in mercury emissions.

They also looked at the impacts of overfishing which changes what top predators eat, such as reducing how many large herring cod are eating.

Warming

Their study, based on three decades of data from fish and seawater from the Gulf of Maine and published in the journal Nature, also looked at what temperature increases would do.

Concentrations of the toxin in cod increased by up to 23% between the 1970s and 2000s as a result of dietary shifts initiated by overfishing and then a recovery of herring populations, they suggested.

The researchers’ computer modelling predicts an increase of 1C in seawater temperatures compared to how warm it was in 2000 would lead to a 32 percent increase in methylmercury levels in cod and a 70% increase in spiny dogfish.

Even with a 20 percent decrease in methylmercury in sea water as a consequence of reductions in emissions, a 1C temperature rise would lead to increases of 10% in cod and 20% in spiny dogfish, the researchers said.

They also analysed the effects of recent ocean warming from a low in 1969 on concentrations of the mercury in Atlantic bluefin tuna and found it could contribute to an estimated 56 percent increase in levels in the species.

Exposure

Elsie Sunderland, a senior author of the paper, said: “We have shown that the benefits of reducing mercury emissions holds, irrespective of what else is happening in the ecosystem.

“But if we want to continue the trend of reducing methylmercury exposure in the future, we need a two-pronged approach.

“Climate change is going to exacerbate human exposure to methylmercury through seafood, so to protect ecosystems and human health we need to regulate both mercury emissions and greenhouse gases.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the PA environment correspondent.

The highly controversial practice of allowing investors to sue national governments before investment tribunals risks a chilling effect on meaningful action on climate change, environmental law experts have warned.

Legal experts from ClientEarth are calling governments around the world to address the risk that investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms could halt climate measures, such as phasing out fossil fuels or introducing carbon taxes.

Investment arbitration mechanisms like ISDS are included in around 3000 investment and trade agreements worldwide, like the trade agreement between the EU and Canada (CETA). They enable big corporations to side-line domestic courts and sue governments – whose environmental or social policies may affect their investment – in massive compensation claims.

Rapid exit

In a brief submitted to the UN Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), where discussions to reform the ISDS system are ongoing, legal experts have warned governments participating in the reform process that foreign investors may want to use ISDS to challenge and delay emission reduction policies needed to implement the Paris Agreement.

Co-author of the briefing, ClientEarth Trade and Environment lawyer Amandine Van den Berghe said: “The ISDS system has given rise to an alarming number of claims against environmental measures, which are already the fastest growing trigger for dispute. This poses a specific and concerning threat to the global fight against climate change.

“We are running out of time to take meaningful action to avoid catastrophic climate change.

“Amid this climate emergency, we call on governments to respect their international commitments, and push for a deep and systemic reform of ISDS, so that these mechanisms are not able to undermine efforts to save the planet.”

The briefing’s other co-author Dr Kyla Tienhaara from Queen’s University said: “A rapid exit from the system is by far the preferable option. The window for action to avoid catastrophic climate change is closing and we must quickly remove any obstacles that could prevent or delay the adoption of emission reduction policies.”

Environmental standards

As part of the last phase of the UNCITRAL ISDS reform process, ClientEarth urges parties involved to address the regulatory chill effect of ISDS on climate change policy.

The Vattenfall case is the most striking example of government watering down their environmental standards because of an ISDS dispute.

In their brief to governments, legal experts put forward a series of proposals – the first calls on UNCITRAL working parties to develop a mechanism that allows countries to move away from traditional investment treaties and ISDS.

Alternatively, for states that are not ready to withdraw consent or terminate their treaties, legal experts recommend a series of five measures, which when combined should ensure that only responsible investors who respect international climate commitments can utilise ISDS:

• Exempt all measures taken in pursuit of international obligations under the Paris agreement on climate change from challenge under ISDS;
• Require exhaustion of local remedies before recourse to ISDS;
• Allow counterclaims and ensure full participation for affected third parties;
• Ban third party funding of cases;
• Include climate change considerations in the calculation method for compensation.

This Author 

Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from ClientEarth.

Image: Stop ISDS. 

More than 20,000 people have signed a petition calling for a ban on the sale of toxic personal hygiene products such as tampons and baby nappies.

The online petition launched in June and is currently attracting an average rate of 2,000 signatures a week.

The petition is demanding that supermarkets stop selling personal hygiene products that have been bleached with chlorine dioxide, as they may contain chemicals that are harmful to human health. These products include well-known tampon and diaper brands, as well as incontinence pads and other tissue products such as napkins.

Dangerous chemicals

The chlorine dioxide bleaching process used to make these products releases dioxins – a group of compounds that have been linked to cancer and infertility as well as other health disorders.

The World Health Organisation has classified dioxin as one of the world’s most dangerous chemicals. Recent studies have revealed alarming levels of dioxin in these products, fuelling concern that these products represent a public health risk.

Shockingly, there is no legal requirement for dioxin and other chemical ‘ingredients’ to be listed on the packaging of these products. This lack of disclosure makes it impossible for consumers to avoid any potential toxins when purchasing such items.

The #MyClosestEnemy campaign is looking to raise public awareness on what it calls a ‘hidden issue’ by demanding supermarkets and manufacturers take action.

Stronger controls

Rune Leithe, founder of the #MyClosestEnemy campaign, says supermarkets need to understand the dangers associated with stocking such products on their shelves, and start specifying that their suppliers – the manufacturers of these products – offer safer, totally chlorine-free alternatives and free of other toxic compounds.

“We are calling on Europe’s biggest retail chains – Tesco, Carrefour, Aldi, Lidl, ICA, Axfood and others –  to stop selling these products. The manufacturers of these products can offer non-toxic alternatives by switching to a safer, totally chlorine-free bleaching process, but the vast majority of them have chosen not to – this has to change,” Leithe says.

France is already calling for new laws to make disposable diaper products safer following  a two-year investigation by the Agency for Food, Environment & Occupational Health & Safety (Anses), which found unsafe levels of dioxins and other toxic compounds in various nappy brands being sold across the EU4.

As a result of these findings, French authorities have asked diaper manufacturers to review their production processes and impose stronger controls on the raw materials used to make their products.

Leithe said: “I urge other governments to follow the recommendation of French authorities to eliminate these toxic substances in disposable diapers – but also to go one step further and include other personal hygiene products such as tampons.”

This Article 

This article is based on a press release from MyClosestEnemy. 

Image: Marco Verch, Flickr.