One of the strangest consequences of running a blog that has quite a high volume of traffic is that I receive a great many press releases a day. Most go straight into the electronic bin, but there are exceptions that demand that I read them. One of those came in from Extinction Rebellion this morning.
It said, and I unashamedly quote:
Extinction Rebellion, BBC Wildlife legend Chris Packham and tens of thousands of members of the public will ‘unite for nature' by joining a legal and family-friendly demonstration on the streets of central London on Saturday 22 June 2024.
Backed by a wide-range of nature, wildlife and climate groups, from RSPB to the National Trust, the demonstration aims to be the biggest-ever gathering of nature and climate supporters in the UK.
The Restore Nature Now demonstration will bring thousands of people together to call on all political parties to take action to restore nature and tackle climate change in the UK, as one of the worst nations for nature loss.
Environment campaigners are urging everyone who cares for nature to unite and march through London to Parliament Square on Saturday 22 June, with a simple demand to all political parties: Restore Nature Now.
The press release includes quotes from Chris Packham, the RSPB, the Wildlife Trusts and others. XR is clearly working with them on an agenda that they say demands:
- A pay rise for nature – Farmers manage 70% of UK land and have a huge role to play in supporting environmental recovery. But they need more support. We want to see the nature and climate-friendly farming budget doubled.
- Make polluters pay – Big businesses – from water, to retail, to energy – all contribute to environmental decline. We want new rules to make them contribute to nature and climate recovery, and an end to new fossil fuels.
- More space for nature – Just 3% of English land and 8% of waters are properly protected for nature and wildlife. To meet UK nature and climate commitments we need to expand and improve protected areas, and ensure public land and National Parks contribute more to recovery.
- A right to a healthy environment – Limited access to nature, and pollution in the air and water, affects everyone's health. We're calling for a commitment to an Environmental Rights Bill, which would drive better decisions for nature, improve public health and access to high-quality nature.
- Fair and effective climate action – We cannot save nature without solving the climate crisis. We want to see investment in warm homes and lower bills by increasing home energy efficiency, supporting active travel and public transport, and replacing polluting fossil fuels with affordable renewables to ensure we at least halve UK emissions by 2030.
As they also note:
Polls have revealed that the British public is highly concerned over inadequate UK climate and nature action. Results from two UK-wide surveys conducted by The Wildlife Trusts showed that irrespective of voting choice, nature matters to people across the electorate, with 93% of voters reporting that they believe nature loss is a serious threat to humanity. Recent YouGov UK polling on behalf of WWF-UK also showed that the majority of people (70%) think it's possible to avoid the worst effects of climate change but more than half (58%) think it's only possible with more drastic action.
I am in that last category.
As a founder member of the Green New Deal Group, as well as an enthusiast for nature, I unsurprisingly support these demands made by organisations, many of which I belong to. I will look to take part in this activity in some way.
There is, however, I think much more to this. As John Harris suggested in an article in the Guardian earlier this week, our attitude towards nature might now represent the real faultline in politics and the source of the new radicalism that we need if our society is to survive.
Business does, through its actions, deny the reality that we are facing. For example, I noted a Telegraph headline this morning suggesting that airports want more tax exemptions for tourists to encourage greater air travel to the UK, which is exactly the opposite of what our planet needs.
Similarly, tech companies work their very hardest to make sure that children's exposure to nature is minimised as their screen time is maximised. In the process they undermine the understanding that our existence is utterly dependent upon our relationship with nature, which relationship is in peril.
Despite these best efforts by those businesses and others, I am also quite sure that a growing majority are aware of the risks that we face. There may not be enough people willing to take action as yet. Far too many remain dedicated to consumption-based lifestyles. The reality of the need for change has not permeated the consciousness of sufficient people as yet, but maybe it is beginning to be a major concern for enough people to effect change.
That is my hope. That is why I share this. That is why I am more than happy to be considered decidedly woke on this issue. I am awake to nature. We need everyone to be so.
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A practical thing owners of drives can do is grass them over. If it’s basically a storage space for a car when it’s not in use then you can put it to use capturing carbon. It’s an emergency they say.
Thank you and well said, Richard.
Some of these proposals, especially access, overlap with land ownership and reform thereof.
About twenty years ago, the BBC made a documentary series about the Normans. I thought it was interesting that the it was only the French historian interviewed who (briefly) talked about the dispossession of English owners by the Normans. The persistence of Norman ownership and inequality of ownership was not discussed.
The BBC and CBS are making a series to mark the anniversary of William’s birth in 2027. One wonders if the issue of land will be explored.
It will be interesting if Kevin Cahill, Guy Shrubsole and Andy Wightman are involved with XR et al.
The above said, it may also be better to avoid the issue and painting a target for some rich and powerful people on the back of campaigners.
I forgot that today is the anniversary of the mass trespass at Kinder Scout.
The appalling leasehold farce is essentially a Norman legacy. Eccentrically, the Scots invited the Normans (why you would do that is harder to discern, and I speak as someone with a Norman name); the only Normans we didn’t invite were the Plantagenets, who took offence at any perceived sleight or opportunity to start a fight, and what a pestilential plague they became, for the Scots and French.
While its only relevant to a small part of this post, I get all manner of weird stories via Google on my mobile.
Looking at what the airports want, I am getting a lot of stuff about ‘anti tourism’ protests, in particular in Spain mostly via the Birmingham Mail (?!?)
As a ‘for example’
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/20/thousands-protest-canary-islands-unsustainable-tourism
It was also interesting to see that the Isle of Man Steam Packet has decided not to replace their Fast Ferry Mannanan as they think that Emission Regulations will make the operation of Fast Ferries difficult or impossible (Down I think to revisiting a mis-spent youth on their last steamships which for reasons beyond anyone’s comprehension they got rid of in the early 1980’s)
Now why cant the airports look at what’s happening and possibly think that the writings on the wall for the current model of tourism both because the places people go to are getting fed up it and of course Carbon Emissions?
I cannot but feel the UK biodiversity ship has long sailed, with environmental degradation and species reduction utterly devastating during my lifetime.
Whether or not the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) can agree a start date for the Anthropocene extinction, it is certainly with us.
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2020/september/uk-has-led-the-world-in-destroying-the-natural-environment.html#
Much as I am committed to the environmental movement, having been personally engaged since the early 1960s, and spending over half my working life in environmentaI remediation and conservation projects, including mitigating trampling damage on Kinder and along the Pennine Way, (taking nothing but photographs and leaving nothing but footprints just doesn’t work on moorlands) ……
I cannot but see the march and demonstration as an admission of failure and an exercise in futility.
It is a triumph of hope over experience, and I cannot be optimistic that even present degraded environments will not suffer continued damage.
It is the underlying constructs of homo economicus; the ignorance of resolving the issues of Pigouvian externalities in the last hundred years, (simply because, against dogma, they involve state action); the weakening and abandonment of environmental targets under neoliberalism, (especially in the last 14 years with the English Environment Agency defunded by 70%); the embedded GDP growth mindset, and the continuing dissimulation of the political class in tackling ‘green crap’ and climate change issues, that are the most important blocks to real progress.
Abandoning growth economics as currently defined and enabling de-growth is the only logical course of action. Yet it is as far away now as ever.
In a recent blog piece Bill Mitchell reported on how his own raising of the issues, in a post Keynesian heterodox group thirty years ago, and expression of his concerns on how macroeconomics might work on a finite planet were rubbished, and he commented on the lack of progress since then.
In the mid 90s neoliberal drag was exemplified by the attitude that Herbert Gintis, took :
“Government has been a major source of environmental degradation around the world. Why should it do any better at cleaning up the environment? I understand why the government must PAY to have the work done, but a competitive environment for the delivery of cleanup services should outperform a government monopoly.”
Just weep…
Almost all that is left that might change hearts and minds in the short term is described by catastrophic event theory, so a major environmental catastrophe might just force a reaction, maybe turds floating past the Houses of Parliament and a cholera outbreak in the HoC tearooms , maybe a Fen blow , or a massive flooding event, or – on an even larger scale – that the North Atlantic Drift simply ceases.
I usually tend to ‘glass half full’, but have reluctantly to take the view that even after catastrophic environmental events, given that we have already had the GFC, and seen precious little positive gain since then, and deceit by governments across the globe in tackling environmental issues, that a combination of groupthink, inertia and short term economic self interest will block the necessary changes.
I can only wonder if there will be a society left with an IUGS that can still bicker over when the Anthropocence extinction actually started by 2100, or 2200.
So-called Western “civilisation” was founded on ‘power and mastery over nature,’ enhanced by capitalism to promote nature as a source of profit. I prefer the Capitalocene to Anthropocene (see Jason Moore on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis – https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036). Anthropocene takes the view that human beings per se are incapable of seeing themselves as part of nature, whereas it is when capitalism takes hold about 500 years ago that some humans began to lord it over nature. “Nature” includes women, children, indigenous people, people of colour, etc.
Recently, reading some histories of the way the mafia operated / operates in the US and across the capitalist world, I now see their operating system as the dominant mode of practice of power today, that is, bribery, blackmail and corruption – of politicians, the police, judiciary, etc. A good example was the way institutional racism was cited as the cause of the police behaviour in the Stephen Lawrence case when the actual root cause was corruption.
Corruption thrives on dishing out fear to stop us taking action to reclaim what is already ours. This is what we face today.