Air pollution could shorten a child’s life by up to seven months, a study on one of the largest UK cities has suggested.

An eight-year-old child born in 2011 may die between two to seven months early if exposed over their lifetime to projected future pollution concentrations, Kings College London researchers studying Birmingham have found.

It is the first time new government guidance on “mortality burdens” of air pollution has been applied in practice in a large city area.

Costs

The study looked at the combined impact of two pollutants – particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide – two of the leading causes of poor health from air pollution.

It looked at the effect of air pollution on deaths and loss of life-expectancy but did not include non-fatal health conditions such as asthma.

The impact was considered to be worse than some other major cities in the UK – with the report finding a higher loss of life expectancy in Birmingham than Manchester.

It calculated the annual health cost of air pollution in Birmingham as between £190 million to £470 million per year.

These are not actual costs but a measure of the amount of money society believes it would be reasonable to spend on policies to reduce air pollution, the authors said.

Mortality

A network of local leaders is calling for clean air zones to be established in major cities across the country.

Polly Billington, director of the UK100 network, which commissioned the research, said: “This report should be a wake-up call to policymakers not just in Birmingham but across the country.

“We need to tackle this invisible killer, which is cutting the lives of children and causing health misery for thousands of adults.

“By working together, local councils and central government can put in place ambitious and inclusive clean air zones to tackle the most polluting sources of dirty air and let us breathe freely.”

The excess mortality cost to the UK of air pollution has been estimated at between £8.5 billion and £20.2 billion a year.

Example

Sue Huyton, co-ordinator of the Clean Air Parents’ Network, said: “It’s awful that children living in the UK are breathing air that may shorten their lives.

“As a parent, you want to do everything you can for your children, but when it comes to air pollution you can feel helpless – that’s why those in power must step up.

“We need the Government and Birmingham City Council to take ambitious action to tackle the toxic air in this city, and we need them to do it now.”

A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Air quality has improved significantly in recent years, but air pollution continues to shorten lives which is why we are taking concerted action to tackle it.

“We are working hard to reduce transport emissions and are already investing £3.5 billion to clean up our air, while our Clean Air Strategy has been commended by the World Health Organisation as an ‘example for the rest of the world to follow’.

Suffering

“In the Strategy we committed to setting an ambitious long-term air quality target and we are examining action needed to meet the WHO annual guidelines to significantly reduce PM2.5 levels.

“Our Environment Bill will give legal force to that strategy and put environmental accountability at the heart of government.”

Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England said: “2.6 million children in England are breathing in toxic fumes every day and now there is clear and frightening evidence that this could also shorten their lives.

“The NHS is taking practical steps to reduce our effect on the environment, as well as treating those suffering the consequences of air pollution, yet we cannot win this fight alone and the growing consensus on the need for wider action across society is welcome.”

This Author

Jemma Crew is the PA health and science correspondent.

The use of wild animals in travelling circuses could be made illegal in Wales.

Legislation preventing the use of camels, zebras and reindeer was “overwhelmingly backed” following a consultation by the Welsh government.

The Wild Animals and Circuses (Wales) Bill is expected to be laid before the National Assembly today (Monday) and could see anyone flouting the law left facing an unlimited fine.

Ethical

Lesley Griffiths, minister for Environment, Energy and Rural Affairs, said animals should be “treated with dignity and respect”.

She said: “The declining number of wild animals kept by travelling circuses is a clear indication the public appetite for this type of entertainment is not what it once was.

“The use of wild animals in travelling circuses contributes little to further our understanding of wild animals or their conservation.

“The introduction of this Bill sends a clear message this Government and the people of Wales believe this practice to be outdated and ethically unacceptable.”

Wild

The Government said only two circuses travel the UK with wild animals, but there were “renewed calls” to ban the practice when they visited the country.

It added similar legislation exists in Scotland and the Republic of Ireland and will be introduced in England from 2020.

Head of animal welfare and captivity at Born Free Dr Chris Draper said: “The use of wild animals in travelling circuses is outdated and unpopular, and this legislation will bring Wales into line with a long and increasing list of countries which have banned this practice.

“It also means that Great Britain may soon be free of circuses with wild animals.”

This Author

Alexander Britton is a reporter with PA. 

In the ten days that I spent in Neora Valley National Park in December last year, with Rohit Naniwadekar of Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), and his collaborators Arkajyoti Shome and Sitaram Mahato of Nature Mates, the walk from Doley to Ambeok camp was the most memorable. 

Read Part I here.

Accompanied by Gorey Tamang from the forest department, we walked down the ridge that flanks Neora khola to the west. The walk started out along the pipeline that supplies water to Kalimpong but soon we left the pipeline behind and hit the ridge that we were to follow down to Ambeok. Gradually the undergrowth thinned out and the trees got larger, the soil softer. 

There’s a certain peace that descends upon you when walking through an old-growth forest. The sunlight filtering through the trees is mild, the breeze cool and moist. A few hours in, and you feel this rhythm in your step as each foot sinks into a soft layer of dead leaves and a feeling of insouciance rises up through your being. You breathe deeper and feel your very soul expand and reach out at the fringes.

Precious timber 

We reached the noisy patch where the feeding frenzy was underway – Mountain Imperial pigeons taking off with loudly clapping wings, Hill mynas trumpeting out fluty calls, Great barbets like heavy bombers.

The fruits that they were feeding on were clustered towards the ends of the branches, like some figs are. The branch-ends also looked a lot like figs, with stipules covering the growing tips of the branches so that they looked like little chillies. 

When we went looking for fallen fruits to identify the species, we were in for a surprise. They weren’t figs at all, but a species of Michelia. A relative of the magnificent Magnolias, Michelias –  Champa, in Hindi; Chap, in Nepali – too have sweet-smelling flowers that give rise to clusters of fruits enclosed in capsules. In time the capsules peel back to reveal fleshy fruits like soft red rubies, huddled together in twos and threes. 

We stood in a saddle on the ridge, and all around us were huge Michelias. Being a precious timber species and much in demand, Michelias get illegally logged throughout the north-east, so such sights are a rarity. 

A friend who knows of such things had once said: “A full-grown tree will get you a good motorbike.” And here we stood in a veritable Michelia orchard, right when it was fruiting! 

A hornbill lands

We’d gone barely twenty meters before we froze again, in mid-step, rooted to the spot by the heavy wingbeats of a hornbill landing.

Hornbills are big birds. So big, in fact, that you can hear their wingbeats from nearly a hundred meters away. It sounds like someone swinging a heavy rope right next to your head. Steady, if they’re flying by, grinding to a stop when they land.

We inched forward and saw parts of the thickly leafed canopy of a Michelia tree move as the hornbill hopped from branch to branch. Then slowly, in a peek here, a glimpse there, we saw a young hornbill feeding on the fruits. 

It had a rufous torso like a male’s, but then but all juveniles have that. The males retain the colour, while the females go black as they mature. 

One can age Rufous-necked hornbills by the slanting black marks on their beaks. They’re born with one and then get one for every year of their life for the first few years, the rate eventually slowing down so that the older ones have no more than eight or nine marks. Our hornbill had two broad marks on its beak. 

Refined feeding

Hornbills start breeding only after three years of age producing usually one chick – sometimes, rarely, two – every year and are known to live up to about forty years of age. 

They relish large seeded fruits, swallowing them whole and then eventually regurgitating the seeds far away from the mother tree, thus ensuring effective dispersal of the trees that they love. But clearly, their diet wasn’t made up of just large-seeded fruits. 

Here, before our very eyes, was this hornbill picking out the tiny red fruits of Michelia with the care of a refined host handling bone china. 

Hornbills have a way of turning their head this way and that to get a better view of things. That and their long eye lashes and the wrinkled skin around their eyes, gives them a wise, ancient look. 

In Rufous-necked Hornbills, the patch of bare skin is blue, the eye, red! Our hornbill seemed to appraise each individual fruit before picking it with the tip of its beak and tossing it down its gullet in one swift motion. Then, after a few minutes that seemed a long, long time, he sensed our presence and flew away, probably to another Michelia nearby.   

Beacons of hope

Rohit, his eyes wide with excitement, got busy taking pictures of the leaves and the fruits. He has studied hornbills for twelve years now, and though he’d always suspected it, he’d never had the opportunity to actually see them feed on Michelia before. But then, he’d also never seen a Michaelia orchard before. 

Places like Neora Valley NP are safe havens for an incredible array of plants, animals, soils and forest types. 

They are islands of native biodiversity holding out against the sea of development that’s razing everything to economically-viable uniformity. They are our beacons of hope, burning small but fierce. 

It isn’t much, but it’s enough to keep us going; enough for us to have faith that when we have had our fill of development, when we are done striving and shoving, and when we are finally ready to seek happiness in contentment, places like Neora valley might still be there to help us on our way.

Crumbling hillside

We reached Ambeok late in the afternoon and after a quick cup of tea, drove up to Lava in the quickly gathering dusk of the short winter days. 

Soon it was too dark to see anything except the road illuminated by the car’s headlights and eventually the lights of Lava showed up. It was not until after we’d walked the upper reaches of Neora Valley NP and were heading down this same road again that I noticed the hillside that the road had been cut into. 

Rohit was driving and I sat in the front seat. The road, which was being broadened and black-topped, went down a spur in a ridge parallel to the one that I had walked with Rohit and Gorey, lacerating it into thin ribbons of dirt. But for the rocks piled up on the roadsides, we could’ve been driving down a sand-dune. 

The hills here have only a thin layer of soil with loose rocks underneath that can’t hold their place once exposed. This, though true for the whole of the Himalaya, is especially evident in the North-East where the heavy rainfall causes the forests to grow incredibly lush, giving the false impression of rich soils underneath. 

The whole hillside, however, is held together only by the trees that grow on it, and once stripped bare, comes crumbling down. Stone and concrete walls were being built in places to hold up the slope, and the whole place, dusty and hot, had a sense of irreparable loss about it. 

Burden of guilt

This ridge too must once have been like the one we walked, I kept thinking, looking across to it, and my heart went heavier inside me. Here I was, sitting comfortably in a car that was speeding down the road that had killed the hillside. 

The muscles around my jaw and my neck began to throb under the dull burden of guilt.

I’d travelled with Rohit for two months by then, working in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, walking the forests, talking to people. Through that time, we’d had moments that shook us up inside, experiences that threatened to tear at the fabric of our realities. 

Luckily, the ebb and flow of our emotions were almost always out of sync, and if one of us was down in the dumps, the other was around to cheer him up. 

In Siang, Arunachal Pradesh, for instance, we often had to talk each other back from the verge of callous indifference. How else do you face up to seemingly unsustainable hunting in otherwise perfectly preserved community forests? To weasels and ground-dwelling birds and flying squirrels caught in rat traps? To going days without seeing any hornbills in the forest and then coming across the head of one drying by the kitchen fire? 

Sympathetic engagement

We had to rationalize our way back to the sympathetic engagement that was our staple stance. It’s no worse than living in concrete houses, we’d remind each other; no worse than adding day by day to our burgeoning landfills; no worse than a million choices that we make every day. 

And then the wife of the man who brought back the monkey refused to eat it, didn’t she? But for days afterwards, Rohit’s heart would skip a beat when he saw a hornbill flying by overhead, before he’d realize that we were in Neora Valley, a National Park, and that the bird was safe.

Now, driving down from Lava, I was silent. Our time in Neora was up, but being there has changed both Rohit and me in ways that we don’t fully realize yet. 

That walk we took from Doley to Ambeok, and the tide of sorrow that threatened to drown me on the drive down, are both experiences that I keep coming back to. But in that moment, I needed a hand to pull me out. I needed perspective to think this thing through. 

Hope

Rohit must’ve noticed it because he pointed to a saddle in the ridge that I was looking over to, “Right this moment they must be nicely at it, eh?!” he said, grinning. He was talking about the birds feeding in the Michelia orchard. 

“Yeah”, I managed to smile back, clutching at the straws that he offered me. “And the hornbills must be coming in to feed too; fearlessly.” 

Still smiling, he quietly reached into his breast-pocket and without taking his eyes off the road, placed something in the palm of my hand. I looked down at my cupped hand, and there lay four Michaelia fruits, smaller than split gram, bright as spilt blood. 

“There’s hope”, he said. “There’s still hope.”

Read Part I here.

This Author 

Sartaj Ghuman is a freelance biologist, writer and artist based in India. 

I spent ten days in Neora Valley National Park in December last year, with Rohit Naniwadekar of Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), and his collaborators Arkajyoti Shome and Sitaram Mahato of Nature Mates. We were there to survey for Rufous-necked Hornbills.

Read Part II here.

Tucked away in a corner of West Bengal, bordering Bhutan to the east and Sikkim to the north, the core of Neora Valley NP spreads outward from the two ridges that cradle Neora khola; khola being the Nepali word for river. 

We walked almost one hundred kilometers in the ten days that we were there, covering as much of the region as we could and interviewing forest workers and residents.

Soaring majestically 

Large tracts of this forest were once corporation forest, accessed by roads that were cut into the hillsides. The mountaintops, however, and the interiors, escaped this fate. 

A lot of the lower areas are dominated by straight-boled pioneers – like macaranga and exbucklandia – competing with the Cryptomerias left over from the plantations. But the higher reaches have the calm, settled air of perpetuity.

Neora Valley NP covers just about 160 km2, but it was herethat we walked through some of the best primary sub-tropical montane forests that we’d ever seen, and met some of the most knowledgeable and dedicated staff that we’d ever encountered. And yes, we also encountered Rufous-necked Hornbills.

These birds measure more than a meter from beak to tail and have a wing-span just as large, but they weigh no more than a new-born baby. Thus they soar majestically over the canopy, their large wings churning the air with flaps that resonate through the whole forest.  

Their black tail and wings end in sheer panels of white that light seems to pass clear through, and while the females dress all in black, the males have a torso of raw umber, their nape bristling with fluffy feathers of burnished red. They look like warriors ready for battle or revelers on their way to a bacchanalia, with the war-paint-like diagonal black marks on their pale-yellow beaks.

Forest ecology

Historically, Rufous-necked Hornbills ranged over large parts of South-east Asia, but today the Rufous-necked Hornbill is found only in two disjunct regions: northern Laos and the adjoining parts of Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar and China; and in north-east India, Bhutan and the adjoining forests of western Myanmar. 

These long-lived, slow-breeding birds play a vital role in forest ecology. Their own ecology, however, is poorly understood, with even the status and trends of their populations undocumented in large parts of their natural range. 

Rohit is part of NCF’s Eastern Himalaya Program, headed by Aparajita Datta. Having surveyed Mizoram, Nagaland, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh over the last few years, they now wanted to cover North Bengal, the western limit of the Rufous-necked Hornbills’ range. 

They hope to slowly gather systematic data about the birds’ presence in the whole landscape, one valley at a time. Collateral information gathered during the surveys will let them assess how the various threats that they face in all these places – from hunting to habitat degradation – affect their numbers.

Luckily, to see a bird like that, one gets to walk the forests that it calls home. 

Awed silence

One of the walks that I did with Rohit was down the ridge that flanks Neora khola to the west, from Doley to Ambeok camp, accompanied by Gorey Tamang from the forest department. 

The trail starts out along the pipeline that carries water to Kalimpong before heading down the ridge, passing through undisturbed, old-growth forests. Men will cut roads – or lay pipes, for that matter – into the sides of steep hills as a matter of convenience, but it is always the ridge-tops that have the trails made by the denizens of the forest. 

These trails, as obvious as the channels that water makes, rise and fall with the rhythms of the hills themselves and have a way of making you feel a part of the forest – like you’ve been accepted. 

The forest too changed as soon as we hit the ridge. We walked in awed silence under the shade of massive, old trees draped in thick layers of moss. Every visible surface, from tree trunks to branches, to the very boulders rising up from the earth were covered in moss, and out of every nook and cranny that could hold the least amount of soil, there grew plants – saplings, climbers, orchids, ferns. 

So far in Neora, we’d had some great sightings of Rufous-necked Hornbills flying high overhead, or calling, perched on distant tree tops, but we were yet to see one close up. The forest we were in now seemed extremely promising. 

Loud fluttering

Suddenly, with a whirr like little engines starting, a large flock of Mountain Imperial pigeons took off from the treetops just ahead. By the time we got there, they’d circled and come back to join the cacophony of Hill Mynas who were flying to and fro in numerous flocks of a dozen or so each. 

The whole canopy was quaking with the loud fluttering, the air alive with the Mynas’ clarinet calls. Great Barbets added to the confusion with their short bursts of heavy flight, as if they’d eaten too much and could no longer manage to stay airborne. 

There were birds everywhere! It was so surreal that we stood transfixed, faces upturned, eyes glued to our binoculars.

Rohit said: “They love whatever it is that they’re eating,” turning to look at me for a moment. “And if the pigeons eat it, I’d bet hornbills do too.”

Extremely enthusiastic

Doley, where we started the walk, lies inside the National Park. The wildlife camp there was burnt down ‘during theagitation’, so we’d had to stay at the village of Kuanpani, outside, where the forest check-post is. Four members of the staff, including the Beat Officer, stay at the wildlife quarters there. 

Our survey was carried out on a shoestring budget so our sleeping arrangements were pretty basic: we’d usually just spread out our ground mats and sleeping bags in the porches of the forest department’s building wherever we went. But here the porches were too small. 

Seeing our predicament, the department staff surprised us by cheerfully offering us their own beds! Though deeply moved, we turned down the offer, of course, and went and found a room at the only hotel in the village. 

In all our years of traveling through protected areas in the country and interacting with the department, nowhere have we met staff that went so endearingly far to make us feel welcome. If one was to go by the tourism department’s tagline of West Bengal being the “sweetest part of India”, then the hills of North Bengal are definitely the sweetest part of West Bengal.  

Everyone we met was also extremely enthusiastic about our venture. “Only if we can show you how beautiful the place is, can you tell the world about it”, said 50-year-old Emraj Giri, who accompanied us on one of our first walks from Mouchuki camp up the ridge to the east of Neora khola, all the way to the top of the mountain called Thosum. 

Protected area

Emraj works with the Forest Department under the somewhat misleading designation of Casual Daily Labour, or CDL. He’s been a CDL for over a decade now.

It was humbling to walk the forest from Mouchuki to Thosum with Emraj, to hear him talk about it, to see it through his eyes – for this was where he grew up. 

Emraj’s father was a herder who had a camp, called a goath, 8 kms above Mouchuki, where the forest department camp now stands. Emraj would help his father care for the two dozen cows that they owned, until he was 13 or 14, which is when the forest was declared a protected area and they had to move out. 

The walk that he took us on was one that he must’ve done numerous times as a child, with his father and their cows. Even now, in spite of his work with the forest department, he has two cows at home. “I have to have cows”, he says, “to feel at home”. 

After they moved out, his father continued to walk the forest under the aegis of the forest department, to look for interesting orchids. He was fit almost right until he passed away at the age of 99. “I’ll also walk these trails at least till I’m 80”, said Emraj. And even at 50, he walked as fast as the best of us, guiding us through the forest that he knew and loved so well.

Gone wild

Emraj was an apt representative of the forest department, which gave us unwavering support throughout the survey and without which we could never have managed to conduct the survey with such efficiency. 

We’d reach a place in the evening, meet up with the Beat Officer or the Ranger and discuss the next day’s plan, asking their advice about the best places to explore. And then early the next day we’d be met by one or two CDLs and sometimes even a Beat Officer, assigned to accompany us into the forest. 

And so it was that the day after we got to Kuanpani, Gorey Tamang was waiting for us at six in the morning. We drove in for an hour and a half and got dropped off about a kilometer before Doley camp.

The morning was chilly, dew dripped from the leaves overhead and sunlight colandered in angled shafts through the trees. We walked past some stands of aged Cryptomerias: reminders that this was once corporation forest. 

Cryptomeria japonica, natives of Japan, were brought long enough ago to be now clubbed – along with native cypresses – into the local name dhuppigiven for all aromatic conifers that can be used as incense. Cryptomerias were the trees of choice wherever montane forests had to be converted into economically lucrative monocultures. 

But these trees had gone wild by now – cloaked in thick layers of mosses and lichens, they twisted around fallen trunks in charming disorder.  And any signs of historical disturbance were soon forgotten as we walked further in and the forest took on a more mature appearance.

Speaking softly 

Gorey has also been a CDL for over a decade. He went to work in Sikkim as a young man where he did heavy labour for two years before he came back and joined the department and he’s been going steady ever since. His face is youthful, but the hair graying at his temples give him away. At 49, he’s “over the ridge, as far as age is concerned”, he said. 

He wore an imitation leather jacket with the resin coming off in patches at the shoulders, and he replaced his woolen cap with a headband when the sun came up. I do the same to keep sweat out of my eyes.

I offered him biscuits when we stopped a few hours later and he said he wasn’t hungry. “I eat twice a day”, he said with an unassuming smile, “once in the morning and then again only in the evening. Like a camel, I can tank up and then don’t need food or water all day. 

“How can you explore the forest if you have to keep worrying about such things?” he added with a smile, and his eyes crinkled up in an array of crow’s feet.

Completely at ease in the forest, he spoke only when spoken to, and even then, softly. He lives with his wife and his 21-year-old son. They don’t have fields or cattle since his wife is often ill and his son stays busy with his studies. He studies computers. “He hasn’t said what he wants to do next”, said Gorey, “but I guess he has a plan. He probably won’t stay on here.” 

Gorey’s elder brother and his nephews are farmers. “It’s a tough life”, he said about farming, “it was much easier during their parents’ time; one could access the forest and there was plenty of fodder available close to the villages.” 

He had a thoughtful way of speaking. He’d pause and look away, and then turn back to finish a thought. He did this now and turning back with a smile, added, “Also, people lived simpler lives then. No?” 

Agitation 

In half an hour, we got to the charred remains of what was once Doley camp. It was burnt down during the ‘agitation’ the year before. What had started as resentment over Bengali language being made compulsory in schools had escalated into a reiteration of the demand for the separate state of Gorkhaland; and that demand, once out in the open, was quickly hijacked by the more violent factions.

The staff had been staying in camp all through the agitation last year, Gorey told us. The physical presence of the staff was the only way of ensuring that the camps wouldn’t be vandalized. This was true of every forest camp that we visited. All the staff had stayed put, on strike, without pay, for a hundred and five days. 

The armed groups in support of the new state were hiding in these forests, and after a couple of gruesome encounters by Indian security personnel, they became convinced that the wildlife staff was giving out information about their whereabouts; thus the targeting of wildlife camps in the forests while the PHE (Public Health and Engineering) camps were seemingly spared.

Then one day during that time the staff at Doley ran out of rations and had to come down to Kuanpani. They got delayed and did not make it back the same day. That night the camp was burnt down, along with all their clothes and personal belongings – everything razed to the ground. All that remained were the charred cement posts of the foundation that we saw before us.

“Stupid people”, was the general opinion about the violent agitators current amongst the people that we talked to. 

“That’s no way to go about demanding a state” said Gorey. “Make a sensible argument, place your demand, talk; beseech if you must. What’s the point of burning things down? And who’s money is it anyway? Doesn’t go out of the government’s pockets. Goes out of our own pockets.”

Original inhabitants

Past the camp, we came across ample evidence of logging as well, all stolen during the agitation. We’d come across such opportunistic thievery in other places as well, because “patrolling was difficult during the agitation”, as one of the staff put it mildly. They could very well have been murdered for just being in the camps, on the pretext of being informers. But those days were behind them now.

A Beat Officer that we talked to told us: “It’s not going to happen now. The leader of the armed resistance – after the murder of a high-ranking police officer – is missing without a trace; a hundred and five days of strike and nothing to show for it.”

“It’s never going to happen again”, another CDL told us. “The CM’s too clever for all this. Look at the boards that she split us up into”, he said, referring to the ethnicity- or caste-based boards that have been formed and given favours in terms of job-quotas or subsidies.

“It was never going to happen anyway”, said another Lepcha CDL. The Lepchas were the original inhabitants of Sikkim and parts of North Bengal, long before the coming of Buddhist rulers from Tibet, or the more recent arrival of the Nepalese from the west. “What’s all this righteous talk of Gorkha-land?” he said. “All of this – and a lot of Sikkim as well – is actually Lepcha-land, isn’t it?” 

Water supply

Just above the charred remains of the Wildlife camp at Doley is a PHE camp. It survived the agitation unharmed. Water supply is probably too sensitive an issue even for armed guerrillas to take lightly; especially since this camp services the pipeline that supplies water to Kalimpong – the district headquarters and political hotbed of the movement.

Though there was no one in the PHE camp, the clothes put out to dry showed us that it was currently inhabited – probably by people repairing the pipeline along which our path now went. It’s a massive pipe that follows the contour lines here. It goes hugging the hillside, snaking around spurs, twisting into gullies, and then every once in a while, it shuns a particularly narrow ravine to reach out over vertiginous bridges. On an embankment before one such bridge, embossed in neat stone-work, is spelt out a large ‘1991’.

When I looked up old articles and reports about the pipeline, I realized that efforts to get the pipeline project – known officially as the Neora Khola Water Supply Scheme – sanctioned, started in the early 1980s. 

Ironically, while the West Bengal Public Health and Engineering (PHE) department was trying to negotiate the terms of the project with the Central Environment Department, efforts were also underway to get Neora Valley – the very forest through which the proposed pipeline would pass – declared a National Park.   

The project, started in 1985, was supposed to have supplied 1.5 million gallons of water daily to Kalimpong, at an estimated cost of 22 Crore Rupees. Kalimpong then had a daily water requirement of about 750, 000 gallons, though recent estimates suggest that this has risen to a million gallons in recent years.

Sparkling streams

When it was inaugurated in 1993, the pipeline supplied about 500,000 gallons of water, of which 200,000 gallons were earmarked for the defense cantonment, since the defense ministry had chipped in when the project costs escalated due to delays. 

Disappointment at the failure of the Scheme to meet its purported goal is rekindled every year when the inevitable landslides and alleged illegal tapping disrupt the water supply. 

But the fact that the pipeline exists and continues to function is itself a source of wonder. The pipeline originates at what is quite enigmatically called the “Source”, a place in the upper reaches of Neora Valley National Park, which we were fortunate enough to visit. 

A number of small streams of sparkling clear water run leaping over mossy rocks, under ancient oaks or through dense forests of sleek, blue-grey bamboo. The streams come together to form the head-waters of the Neora river.  

At a place where the stream is big enough to ensure a year-round supply of water, a series of low weirs have been built, with the large, gaping mouth of the pipe in one corner. Here begins a journey that will take the water nearly 95 kilometers away, to a reservoir at Deylo – five kilometers above Kalimpong – before it sees the sun and open skies again. 

Amazing sightings 

I couldn’t help but wonder at how the heavy inter-fitting sections must’ve been dragged and levered into place, as we walked along the massive pipeline. 

Though we did pass over some bamboo bridges made during recent repairs, the originals are all lattices of wrought iron that soar high above the steep gullies. 

To a bird-watcher, they’re a canopy-walk in paradise. We stopped every time that a mixed flock passed us by and had some amazing sightings. This was Gorey’s regular patrolling route before the camp at Doley was burnt down; now they come this way less often. 

He was walking ahead of me and I asked him what he thought of the pipeline. It always amazes him, he said, just to imagine how far that water was going. 

Then a few steps later he turned and added with a smile, “Also, people settle in some strange places. No?”

Rising tourism 

We were in Lava the previous day and the forest department had offered to put us up in one of their unused quarters, but admitted that the daily water supply had been down for the last two days and there wasn’t a drop in the tank. They themselves had managed by tapping into the reserves of the nearby church. 

Normally, the town gets water for an hour every morning. “It’s really not so bad when you think about it”, I was told, “Kalimpong gets water for just half an hour every other day.” My friend, who runs a Café in Kalimpong, confirmed this. New connections are impossible to get and all the water they use at the Café has to be bought.

We checked into a hotel in Lava, leased out and run by a Bengali gentleman from Siliguri. One of its rooms was still a temple where the Buddhist owner offered prayers every morning, filling the place with the sweet smell of incense. 

The view from the window was dominated by conspicuous water tanks arrayed on all the buildings, the pipes leading to them like a swarm of tentacles. And yet, new hotels were coming up – there’s money to be made in tourism. 

It was a similar story in almost every place in North Bengal that we went to: precarious water supply, rising tourism, frequent disruptions. In some cases, like in the smaller villages, the pipes are no bigger than garden hoses travelling several kilometers and broken by no more than an accidental kick from a stumbling cow.

Precarity 

It would take more than that to disrupt the water supply to Kalimpong. But if the army had had their way, they’d have done much worse than mere disruption: they had proposed a road through the very source. 

This was to access the point where the border with Bhutan ends and the one with China begins, a sort of tri-junction of boundaries. That proposal, though halted for now, has not been entirely forgotten and will continue to raise its head every time relations between China and India heat up.  

If the proposed road does come, the pipeline would become redundant, for there wouldn’t be any water left to carry. The road would go right through the heart of Neora Valley NP, ravaging the bamboo-rhododendron forest that is home to the Red Panda and Satyr Tragopan, disrupting the numerous tiny streams that arise there and carry water to the forests downstream. 

In that forest, too fragile for words to describe, it was eerie to see blue arrows and codes on the papery barks and fair trunks of the rhododendrons, painted during a reconnaissance survey for the proposed road. 

It was a reminder of how easily all this could be lost; of how it has been lost, over and over again in so many places, on so many pretexts. 

Read Part II here.

This Author 

Sartaj Ghuman is a freelance biologist, writer and artist based in India. 

The UNESCO World Heritage Committee adopted a decision that recommends limiting any future logging in Białowieża Forest to necessary safety measures and activities related to nature conservation during this week’s summit in Azerbaijan. 

ClientEarth, a Non-profit environmental law organisation which led legal action last year to stop illegal logging in the forest, says that UNESCO’s warning sends a clear message to the Polish government to put conversation first in Białowieża.

If Poland fails to comply with these recommendations, the forest will be placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger.

Significant damage

Białowieża Forest is one of the last remaining natural forests in Europe and has been included on the World Heritage List for forty years because of its exceptional natural value and biodiversity.

Yet in recent years its woodlands have suffered significant damage due to intensive logging while it has been managed by State Forests, a government-owned organisation charged with timber production.

ClientEarth wildlife lawyer Agata Szafraniuk said: “The decision of World Heritage Committee sends a clear message to the Polish government: any and all activities in the Białowieża Forest must put nature conservation first. The only one exception is when human safety might be at risk.

“We hope that Poland’s Ministry of Environment and State Forests will respect the decision. If not, Białowieża Forest may be put on the List of World Heritage in Danger, which would be an international shame for Poland.”

Logging in Białowieża sparked massive protests and prompted local campaigners to send a complaint to the European Commission. The logging was eventually declared illegal by the Court of Justice of the EU. Since then, UNESCO has been closely monitoring the situation in the forest. 

New permits

Current recommendations of the World Heritage Committee were based on the findings of IUCN and UNESCO experts who went on a mission to Białowieża in 2018.

The Committee’s decision comes at a time when State Forests are reportedly finishing preparations to recommence logging in Białowieża. 

New logging permits, which will allow them to do so, are awaiting the approval of the Minister of Environment.

This Author 

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

Nature’s ecology is a beautifully complex, interlocking network of species that depend on each other for survival. If one part disappears, it has a knock-on effect on the entire system.

We are in a period of mass extinction and biodiversity is reducing at an alarming rate both globally and here in the UK. It is a crisis. The culprit? Human activity.

The loss of biodiversity in the UK is particularly apparent on British farms, where it has fallen drastically. According to Defra’s own figures, farmland birds declined by 56 percent between 1970 and 2015.

Ancient woodland

It is estimated that this is a loss of at least 44 million individuals, particularly affecting the lapwing, cuckoo and turtle dove, as well as many types of once-common butterflies.

One of the reasons for this staggering drop in the number of wild species, from insects to birds, is due to the grassy monoculture that dominates large swathes of the British countryside, especially in upland areas.

There is field after field after field of grass, all identical and described by Guardian journalist, Michael McCarthy, as akin to ‘green concrete’. This is because these barren grasslands have a similar damaging effect to covering the land with concrete – a huge reduction in the number of species that can thrive there.

The idea that some areas of British countryside, especially upland areas, are only suitable for grazing livestock is simply untrue. These areas were once home to ancient woodland, teeming with life.

Rewilding projects could transform our uplands, helping to foster new life in these grassy deserts, whilst also sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere and helping to prevent lowland flooding.

Heritage

The uplands are where most of our rain falls and increasing tree cover allows the water to penetrate the soil more easily. When land is kept bare for grazing, the water cannot permeate due to the loss of deep vegetation and compacted soil, caused by grazing livestock.

Research suggests that reforesting just 5 percent of the land reduces peak floods by around 29 percent, whilst full reforestation would halve them.

It is often claimed that these pasture lands are part of our British heritage, so should not be changed. Lake District poet, William Wordsworth, famously described England as a ‘green and pleasant land’, and many of John Constable’s paintings depict the quaint grassy hills of the uplands.

No good art, poetry or culture has ever come from trees, forests or woodland, you say? Nonsense – tell that to Rudyard Kipling (The Way through the Woods), A. A. Milne (Winnie the Pooh – The Hundred Acre Wood) or Romantic painter William Turner (Brook and trees).

Increasing woodland in the UK does not detract from our heritage, it enhances it. Woodland cover has decreased over the centuries for a variety of reasons, with agriculture playing a huge part.

Zero carbon

Today, woodland makes up just 13 percent of UK land, compared to a European average of 35 percent. This makes the UK one of the least wooded countries in Europe.

The fact is, we desperately need more trees. Not only to tear up the green concrete that has been spread all over our countryside, but to have any hope of meeting our climate emergency targets. This is supported by Harvard research, which indicates the necessity of large-scale rewilding of pasture land to meet the Paris Agreement global heating targets.

Modelling shows that if all current pastureland was repurposed for rewilding, UK agriculture could meet the necessary greenhouse gas emission cuts required to stay within 1.5 C degrees of heating.

Further modelling shows that if all the crops currently grown for animal feed were repurposed as crops for human consumption, we could also grow enough of a diverse array of crops here in the UK to meet all our nutritional needs.

Now that the UK government has committed to reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050, rewilding on this scale is essential.

Plant protein

This isn’t going to happen overnight, but it needs to start soon if we are to have any chance of averting the biodiversity and climate emergencies. Policy support and legislation will be key to this process, enabling it to happen in the tight timeframes we have left.

The draft Agriculture Bill is currently floating around Westminster in a Brexit limbo, along with many other progressive ideas. This draft legislation is encouraging, especially the principle of ‘public money for public goods.’

This marks a departure from previous policy (the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy), where financial support was linked to the amount of land owned.

Where the ‘public money for public goods’ approach differs, is that it offers subsidies linked to ‘public goods’, which include animal welfare and environmental protection.

Clearly, growing plant protein crops (like pulses) or planting trees, has much better environmental outcomes than grazing ruminant livestock, which produce very high levels of methane gas – a powerful greenhouse gas, approximately 25 times more powerful than CO2.

Disaster

You would think that this would be reflected in the legislation, however there is no mention of this in the Bill, and the Environmental Land Management Scheme – still in development in Defra currently – also doesn’t appear to factor this in.

The Vegan Society has been calling for agricultural subsidies to be weighted towards less environmentally damaging practices, like rewilding and plant protein crop production, to encourage these activities.

Our Grow Green campaign is also calling for policies that make it easier for animal farmers to transition towards more plant-based agriculture.

A package of support for current livestock farmers who wish to transition towards these more environmentally friendly practices would certainly make this easier. Support like this could be decided upon in consultation with farmers but should at least cover the initial capital start-up costs.

Much needs to be done to prevent ecological disaster in our green and pleasant land. Many areas need wholesale revolutions to stop the trend towards extinction. One thing is certain – we need to break up the green concrete paving the way to ecocide in our rural areas.

This Author

Mark Banahan is campaigns and policy officer at The Vegan Society. He tweets at @Mark Banahan. If you would like to learn more about veganism, sign up to the 7-day challenge here.

Wildlife conservation charities are teaming up to force the government to keep its pledge to ban imports of trophy hunting.

The UK allows body parts of animals killed by trophy hunters as long as the importer can show there has been no detrimental impact on the endangered species, and the trophy has been obtained from a “sustainable” hunting operation.

The Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting (CBTH) reports that trophy hunting has risen in popularity with British hunters since the shooting of Cecil the lion in 2015.

Momentum

For the three-year period before the killing of Cecil, the number of lion trophies taken by British hunters was 27, but this rose to 64 in the three years following the controversy, the organisation found.

In 2015, the government said that it would ban imports of lion trophies following international outcry over Cecil’s death.

However, it has not yet taken action, and in April, environment secretary Michael Gove told the BBC that the issue was a “delicate political balancing act”, and that he had been advised by wildlife charities to “be cautious” in following other countries such as France, the Netherlands and Australia in outlawing imports of animal bodies killed for sport.

Gove invited wildlife charities including the CBTH, Born Free and Lion Aid to a meeting in May to discuss the issue. Siobhan Mitchell, campaign director at the CBTH, said that they had been expecting a ban on imports of trophies from canned lion hunts, where the lion is bred in captivity specifically to be hunted, since even the pro-hunting groups attending the meeting opposed this form of hunting. However, they had heard nothing since, she said.

“We want to keep up the momentum on this,” she said, adding that Born Free, Four Paws, Lion Aid and Voice of Lions were some of the groups that CBTH was to collaborate with.

Further discussions

In a statement, the environment department (Defra) said that any policy decisions must be based on robust evidence, adding: “The recent roundtable showed the strong desire on all sides to ensure wildlife is conserved, but also underlined the many opinions on the best way to achieve this.

“The secretary of state will hold further discussions on this critical issue to ensure we find the right solutions.”

An Early Day Motion calling on the government to ban imports of hunting trophies has been signed by 170 MPs from all political parties. Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith, who tabled the motion, said that the idea of people wanting to kill wildlife for fun as the world goes through an “extinction event”, where populations of animals have plummeted by 60% on average since 1970, was “beyond belief”.

“The import of hunting trophies makes a mockery of the UK’s reputation as a nation of animal lovers,” he told guests at a Parliamentary event hosted by the CBTH.

This Author

Catherine Early is a freelance environmental journalist and chief reporter for the Ecologist. She can be found tweeting at @Cat_Early76.

International Development Secretary Rory Stewart has pledged to put climate and the environment at the heart of efforts to improve lives around the world.

At a speech in London, Mr Stewart promised to double his department’s spending and efforts on tackling climate change and protecting the environment.

He announced that £193 million will be spent on research and innovation to reduce emissions and help communities in developing countries adapt to climate change.

Water

Funding will help poorer countries boost their economies in a climate-friendly way, for example piloting the use of small electric vehicles such as tuk tuks and motorcycle taxis known as boda boda in Kenya and Rwanda.

Along with the Met Office, the Department for International Development (DfID) will also be supporting research and technology innovation to improve modelling of African climate systems and weather to help countries, communities and farmers plan for future extremes.

And funding will help poor farmers withstand climate shocks and benefit from “climate smart” agriculture to allow them to grow crops that are more nutritious, resistant to disease and better able to withstand floods or drought.

Mr Stewart’s speech comes after the Government pledged that all UK aid spending would be in line with efforts agreed under the global Paris Agreement to tackle climate change and its impacts.

Weird

He pointed to a recent trip to Jordan where he found that in some places there is barely enough water for people to wash, new bore holes at refugee camps are already running dry and farmers cannot return to their land and crops because of a lack of water. He also saw a solar farm providing cheaper electricity than oil or gas alternatives.

“In one day I saw the immediate effects on people’s lives of climate change – farmers uprooted and refugees struggling – and the very real possibility of a carbon-free future, that is also good for people’s pockets.”

Mr Stewart said sustainable development was not about numbers but about values, and that DfID had a moral purpose to help communities tackle poverty and climate change and protect their local environment.

“If we can get it right we can imagine international development, climate and the environment as a single thing, not a series of weird trade-offs between pro-poor action on one hand and carbon neutral action on the other, but an integrated approach.”

This Author

Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.

The National Trust has announced an end to any investment in fossil fuel companies, as part of efforts to protect the natural environment.

The trust, which generates heat and power from renewable technology such as hydropower, wood fuel boilers and heat pumps, said it will also look for investments in green start-ups and portfolios that benefit the environment.

The charity has just over £1 billion invested in the stock markets and uses the returns on its investments to help look after the coastline, countryside, stately homes, castles and gardens in its care.

Insufficient

It had already moved to ensure that no investment was made in companies which get more than 10% of their turnover from extracting coal for power stations or oil from oil sands.

But now it is “divesting” the remaining 4% of its current portfolio which is invested in fossil fuels.

The National Trust is one of many organisations including charities, churches, pension funds, companies, governments and individuals who have sought to shift investment away from polluting fossil fuels to tackle climate change.

Globally, campaigners at the Divest Invest movement estimate that organisations with assets totalling £7 trillion have made the shift.

Many organisations have been working hard to persuade fossil fuel companies to invest in green alternatives but those firms have made “insufficient progress”, Peter Vermeulen, the charity’s chief financial officer, said.

Commitment

The majority of divestments will be made within 12 months, with the process completed within the next three years, he said. The charity does not expect the move will have a negative impact on financial returns.

National Trust director-general Hilary McGrady said: “Returns from our investments are vital for helping us protect and care for special places across the nation.

“They enable us to look after the natural environment and keep our membership fees affordable to the millions of people who are part of our organisation.

“The impacts of climate change pose the biggest long-term threat to the land and properties we care for and tackling this is a huge challenge for the whole nation.

“We know our members and supporters are eager to see us do everything we can to protect and nurture the natural environment for future generations. This change is part of our ongoing commitment.”

Plastics

New measures by the National Trust also include establishing a long-term goal to continue to reduce the carbon footprint of its investments,and increasing engagement with the companies it invests in to make them improve their environmental performance.

The Trust describes itself as Europe’s largest conservation charity, and looks after 780 miles (1,255km) of coastline, 613,000 acres (248,000 hectares) of land, and more than 500 historic houses, castles, monuments, gardens, parks and nature reserves across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Mr Vermeulen said: “We want to protect the environment by becoming more energy-efficient. In the last four years we’ve created our own green heat and power through the design and build of heat pumps, hydro schemes, solar PV and wood fuel boilers.

“We’re also exploring farming and land management methods that reduce flooding, help clean water supplies and restore wildlife, while at the same time offering innovative ways to deliver new revenues into farm businesses.”

The charity also plans to phase out single-use plastics from its shops and substantially reduce it in its cafes by 2022, Mr Vermeulen said.

This Author

Emily Beament is the Press Association environment correspondent.

Extinction Rebellion (XR) is a direct action group organised on a global scale. The main target of their protests is are national governments who have demonstrated extreme inaction in the face of climate breakdown, despite stark warnings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

XR campaigners recently brought parts of London to a standstill for almost two weeks. Actions have included gluing themselves to trains and organising roadblocks, as part of a planned “Week of Rebellion” in April 2019.  

The Metropolitan Police Service arrested over 1,100 protesters and are aiming to refer their cases to prosecutors for conviction. Yesterday plans were announced for a “summer uprising”.

Domestic extremism

Tensions between climate campaigners and governments are rising across the world. The Polish Government banned members of the American group 350.org from entry, perceiving them to be a “threat to national security” . 

Meanwhile, in Australia, thirteen XR protesters were removed from a sit-in at the lower houses of Parliament, while forty animal rights activists who chained themselves to vehicles at a busy intersection were arrested. 

Australian PM Scott Morrison derided the activists as “green criminals” and “un-Australian”.

The choice of rhetoric in these two cases resonates with the nebulous term “domestic extremism”, used here in the UK. 

This article reflects on what role the police will play as this new wave of climate activism becomes more prominent and as climate breakdown progresses. Historical and contemporary criminology can help us predict this role. 

Policing order

The police are primarily conceived of as crime-fighters, but another core function is “order maintenance”. 

This means maintaining public order through minimising disruption in the daily life of a society in the broadest sense or in a more localised sense, such as making sure there is no unreasonable disruption on a city street. 

However, scholars like Mark Neocleous, Peter K. Manning or Jean-Paul Brodeur, deem the maintenance of order not merely as a sense of quietude or peaceful busyness of “law-abiding” citizens. It can also mean the maintenance of a certain politico-societal orthodoxy, either directly through political policing or indirectly through the management of localised protest against governmental policies. 

Brodeur points out this function of the police from its early incarnations in Tsarist Russia and Napoleonic France. It is an expression of the State’s Weberian capacity to maintain the monopoly on legitimate violence within its territorial boundaries. 

Even the inception of the British Police in 1829, with the Metropolitan Police Force Act, attracts radical accounts such as from Mike Brogden, who points out its role in regulating nineteenth Century industrial labour and working class movements, as well as intervening in labour disputes between employers and labourers. 

Colonialism and class

The expansion of the police force is an important co-development of the capitalist state, as it’s responsible for disciplining the expanding urban populace and workforce. 

Postcolonial accounts of policing argue that before the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829, prototype forces such as the Irish Peace Preservation Force or the private police force of the East India Trading Company point to colonial disciplining of the populations of the colonies as another influence on the policing of the working class of the metropoles. 

It is telling that in his history of the spread of policing to the Northern English provinces post-1829, historian Denis Storch quoted the contemporary moniker of the police officer as “domestic missionary”, who regulated and suppressed working class pastimes like cock-fighting, dog fighting and gambling. 

This ‘domestic missionary’ broughty ‘enlightenment’ and ‘order’ to the ‘uncivilised’ working class populationsm as with the local populace in Ireland, Africa and Asia.

We see this kind of policing of workers in revelations of undercover police sharing data on strikers with private building companies, and getting them blacklisted from the entire construction industry in the 80s. 

Undercover infiltration

Revelations have also emerged of undercover police officers engaging in relationships with environmental activists, fathering children with women campaigners before disappearing without a trace.

Famously, Mark Kennedy was working with the National Public Order Intelligence Unit when he infiltrated environmentalist direct action groups and formed sexual relationships with campaigners under false pretences. 

After the arrest of 114 activists in advance of a suspected sabotage of work at a Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station, some of them suspected that Mark Kennedy had substantial involvement in planning the action. 

Suspicions were also raised over the Special Demonstration Squad in the 1980s and the National Public Order Intelligence Unit as to whether they functioned as agent provocateursduring the 1987 firebombing of a Debenhams. The bombing was tied to an SDS operative named Bob Lambert who was embedded with an animal rights group. 

The police also utilise direct enforcement of the law and overt restraint and arrest of campaigners. 

Physical violence

Environmental activists have often been on the sharp end of political policing. 

There were major inquiries around the use of large-scale kettling in the middle of the London and the death of a member of the public, Ian Tomlinson, after he was struck with a police baton.

Jackson, Monk and Gilmore have written on the direct police repression of resistance to fracking in the North West of England. 

Fracking formed a key part of energy policy of the then Conservative-Liberal coalition, despite fears of impacts such carbon-intensive resource extraction presents for local people in terms of health and environment. 

The land was privatised and physically enclosed, which was met with resistance from social movements. 

Focusing on one enclosure in Barton Moss in Salford, Greater Manchester, the authors argue that the non-violent direct action of these groups were met with 200 arrests on the part of the Greater Manchester Police. Accordinly to Jackson, Monk and Gilmore, children, pregnant women, the elderly were among those arrested, and female protesters were assaulted and sexually harassed. 

Disruption and collapse

Maintaining ‘public order’ also involves regulating street-based protest. 

The police do this with the stated aim of ‘balancing’ the rights of democratic protest and the rights of the users of the city and to minimise disruption.

This is popular in terms of the everyday practicalities of living in and using a city, but it also maintains a status quo that inflicts on those more powerless sectors of society. 

Earlier radical accounts it focussed on class contradictions and social inequalities. Today the carbon intensive economies of the developed world present a danger to the global climate. 

The regulation of environmental protest will result in order being maintained in the name of upholding the hum-drum routines of urban transport, business, commuters and residents, but will be complicit in the disorders of anthropogenic climate breakdown. 

Imbalance

There are several different scenarios suggested for the near-future. These range from warning of the collapse of human civilisation in 50 years, to the more restrained analyses of the IPCC, to the suggestion that those who live in the Global South will need to flee increasingly deadly climate conditions. 

This latter scenario will result in the West further closing its gates and iron-fastening its walls to those fleeing imminent death. We see this already in ‘Fortress Europe, and the growth of far-right xenophobic movements in the US and Europe. 

Maintaining the status quo throws out of balance the conditions for necessary human life in vast swathes of the globe. These are not immediate considerations for the police, as they say: 

“Throughout the course of today, Thursday, 18 April, we will have had more than 1,000 officers on the streets policing the demonstrations. This is putting a strain on the Met and we have now asked officers on the boroughs to work 12-hour shifts; we have cancelled rest days and our Violent Crime Task Force (VCTF) have had their leave cancelled.

“This allows us to free up significant numbers of officers whilst responding to local policing…the protesters need to understand that their demonstration is meaning officers are being diverted away from their core local duties that help keep London safe and that this will have implications in the weeks and months beyond this protest as officers take back leave and the cost of overtime.”

Social character

While the police may be correct in their summary of the immediate disruption that is caused, Extinction Rebellion are correct in focussing on the imminence of climate overshoot. 

The twelve-year limit on avoiding climate collapse should be the utmost priority of political systems and may warrant severe civil disruption to force this on the agenda. The recent Parliamentary declaration of a climate emergency now needs action. 

Willing arrest for peaceful direct action is part of XR’s theory of change.

Extinction Rebellion are engaging in “crimes” or “disruption” but these hold what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called a “social character”, in that “….they expressed a conscious, almost political challenge to the prevailing social and political order and its values”. 

This approach has caused consternation on the part of other radical voices that point out the possibility of activist fatigue on its members, and the fact that potential ‘arrestables’ do not sit on a level playing field: there’s more at stake for a working class protester or person of colour in interacting with the police and carceral justice system. 

Social harm

The police cannot resolve the massive structural and civilizational changes that XR agitates for. 

In future protests the can rely on established tactics such as ‘dialogue policing’, innovated in the wake of anti-austerity protests and controversies over scenes of police enforcement. These tactics have also attracted suspicion from protest movements as an extension of intelligence gathering, especially in light of revelations from the Undercover Police Inquiry. 

A more fruitful path may lie in the discipline of criminology, where there is a move away from talking about “crime” and more focus on “harm”. 

This refers to the damaging actions of more powerful actors, who cause much more harm through their seemingly ‘orderly’ actions than those who are the regular targets of the police, courts and probation service. 

Likewise the petty criminality and disruption of groups like XR legitimately stresses the urgency of the real catastrophe facing us from climate breakdown. 

This Author 

Dr. Aidan O’Sullivan is a lecturer in criminology at Birmingham City University. His PhD focused on how the Metropolitan Police Service policed anti-austerity protests in London. He tweets @aidanosu.