www.pitchfornature.com

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Human numbers are projected to swell to 9 billion and 90% of large fish have been extracted from the ocean, it is clear that to stop fisheries terminally collapsing all of us are going to have to eat less fish. However, it is vital to realise that each of us making this ethical choice will not, in and of itself, be enough to stop the over-fishing driving the death of the oceans.

Corporations are pulling the most fish from the sea. To stop them we need laws to limit their activities. Wild species need space to live, so just like on land we need large wild areas protected from human interference. The excellent video above outlines how such agreements come into being. I was disturbed when i checked out the comments underneath True Activists posting of the video. The most liked comment read “you could waste your time talking to politicians.. or you could just stop eating fish..”

I think this shout out strikes to the core of our challenge – it is not just ourselves we need to worry about – there is everybody else as well. The human superorganism isn’t just the sum of its parts just like an ant colony is more than just a lot of ants. Novel functions emerge out of the complex interaction of differentiated parts.

High-tech, corporate fishing fleets navigate by satellite are partly funded by governments and generate wealth for shareholders. A reduction in demand for their product in one market is not going to stop them. They will just increase sales in other markets, create new products, aggregate demand or genetically engineer “super-pigs” that grow twice as fast when fed congealed fish balls. Corporations don’t back off. They only move forward and those at the wheel only want to move faster.

The threat of a complete and devastating collapse of global fisheries requires us to consider the worst. If fishing fleets continue to extract fish at existing rates we will see extinction events like the loss of North Atlantic Cod. This is devastating economically, reduces a crucial protein source to billions of humans and may fundamentally destabilise ocean ecosystems leading to unpredictable run-away changes.

Overfishing by Alex Hofford

If we are motivated to protect the ocean and preserve the fish that live within it we have to organise to stop fishing fleets and create large-scale marine reserves that are policed. The tools we have to do this are limited. We can occupy the land and boats of the fleets to stop them sailing but we have seen how governments will violently protect corporate interests. Is anyone going to try something similar in Russia any time soon? Anyway, if one corporation is stopped another will step up to seize the resource. We need to get to the heart of the problem and change the rules of the game.

If we pull back into space we clearly see the problem. The algorithms determining the functioning of the human superorganism are out of sync with our planetary circumstance. The dials are still set as if we were small and growing into an abundant and limitless frontier – like back in 1831 when Darwin sailed on the Voyage of the Beagle. There were only one billion humans on the planet and everywhere they stopped they were met by the extraordinary wildlife of a thriving biosphere.

200 years of human population growth compounded with surging levels of consumption have created a very different planet. The cavernous excavations of natural systems have left them teetering on the brink, meanwhile, the wealth-concentrating function of corporations has created a remote elite with vast hoards of capital running organisations that span the world and answer to no one.

We need to adjust the controls of our superorganism so that it: stops expanding outwards, consumes less, functions more efficiently and produces less pollution. We can achieve this by, for example, shifting to an interest-free monetary system, limiting the economy, giving legal rights to natural systems and passing global treaties to limit pollution and ban war. To achieve these ends we must address governance issues and politics.

It isn’t just naive to think changing the behaviour of some individual ants will fix this situation it is disastrous because to protect what is left of nature we need to move quickly and decisively. This is the problem with environmental organisations that solely emphasise lifestyle changes – they distract us from the main causes of harm and let the powerful off the hook.

If we have reached the conclusion that our politicians have simply become administrators for large corporations and will work to concentrate wealth further even while the planet dies then surely then answer isn’t to back off and leave them to it!? If politicians are banqueting with bankers on the bones of our dying world lets not retreat into a muggy haze of personal development. Lets not kid ourselves that individual actions are enough. We have to get organised and change the system – thats called politics.

Vote here to stop the industrial destruction of the deep ocean.

The post Why Eating Less Fish Won’t Work appeared first on EcoHustler.

Badgers are accused of reducing the profits obtainable by cattle farming. Intensively reared cattle, living in unnaturally close quarters are prone to infection. Rather than farming less intensively, the National Farmers Union and the government want to tackle the disease by destroying the living vectors as if these wild creatures have no value apart from their roles as carriers of disease.

An alternative strategy to attacking badgers would be to ease off intensive cattle farming which has a huge climate impact, pollutes water and land and leads to systemic suffering in herds pressured into over-production of milk.

A shift in diet is long overdue anyway. We can well do without the surplus of milk that EU-subsidised cattle produce. The marketing that we should all drink milk every day is increasingly dated. The evidence is out – what cows produce for their calves is not appropriate for humans to ingest regularly. The surging health problem in the UK is obesity not calcium deficiency.

Thinning out the population of cattle farmers doesn’t have to be bad for the economy. There are many better ways that cattle farmers can earn a good, honest living, especially if EU subsidies are shifted away from incentivising production towards more complex, ecologically and socially positive outcomes.

Sutton Community Farm

Land can be gradually shifted towards more diverse functions including energy generation, conservation and recreation as well as producing a broader range of healthier food. More skilful, labour-intensive, agriculture which incorporates composting, the reintroduction of rare breeds and heritage species can be an opportunities for farms to reach out again to their communities and offer new jobs and education. Sutton Community Farm and River Cottage are two successful examples of this approach.

Also, why not broaden our diet and farming with other species like deer and rabbit that are healthier to eat, easier on the land and can be incorporated within a rich and diverse mosaic of ecological productivity?

If humans always prioritise the economy over the natural world then prospects of living a good life diminish as the ecological systems that support us break down. Where do we draw a protective line around what remains of nature?

England  has already dramatically transformed its terrestrial ecology. The land was once completely forested and in amongst those trees roamed wolves, bears, wild boar, otters, beavers and other fascinating and unusual beasts. Above the canopy soared eagles and osprey. Today, 99% of this forest and most of these creatures have gone. The land is impoverished and without the dense fecundity of surface vegetation the soil is gradually washed out to sea. This doesn’t just harm our ability to grow food and harvest resources, it exposes our souls to the barren abyss of space that life keeps at bay.

Badgers are the UK’s largest, extant wild carnivore. If we choose to see them simply as a barrier to the economic contributions of intensively farming cattle we are missing the main point, and anyway, economics isn’t that interesting. Economic development has already gone too far. Our project now is to protect what is left of wild flora and fauna and this requires us to be proactive and rehabilitate the land: plant trees, dig ponds and reintroduce species that have gone.

Having the humility to see that we are not the superior overlords of this planet but in fact just a small part of something massively more complex then we currently understand isn’t a step down because we are integral to the biosphere. The sense of being a small part of something bigger than ourselves is at the core of a sense of belonging and also spirituality. Having love and compassion for other creatures, the ecosystem we are within and in totality our living planet, Gaia, is an opportunity for deeply-satisfying psychological, emotional and spiritual growth. Letting other carnivores roam the land with us can be a source of pride.

The post Time for a Cattle Farmer Cull appeared first on EcoHustler.

The European Union spends around €55 bn. a year on farm subsidies. You might think that this money would be used to protect the countryside and the lies of traditional farmers. Unfortunately, subsidies get skewed by powerful vested interests. Large US corporations have received EU funding for setting up industrial hog farms in Poland. In many cases, wealthy land owners are rewarded with subsidies and this might help them swallow up smaller neighbours. Since 1999 The Royal Farms Windsor has received €1,387,100 in payments from the European Union .

farmsubsidy.org helps people find out who gets what, and why.

Part of eutransparency.org

Mega Fish Subsidy Infographic

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London’s sewage system is at capacity. Frequently, when overwhelmed, raw sewage spills out of overflow pipes into the Thames. This kills fish, is a threat to people and isn’t acceptable in a modern, mega metropolis.

What’s the best solution? More sewer? Or a healthier city?

Thames Water may sound like a public utility operating for the common good but names can be deceptive. Since it was privatised it functions along the same modus operandi as all corporations – it concentrates wealth for its shareholders. In the case of Thames Water this is a consortium led by the European arm of the Australian bank Macquarie Group.

Sir Peter Mason – Chairman (ex-BAE Systems)

The Australian media labelled the Macquarie Bank ”The Millionaire Factory” because of its high margins and generous rewards for its executives and shareholders. Thames Water has fallen in-line and stands accused of ripping off consumers by simultaneously underspending on services (as accused by Ofwat) and paying no corporation tax whilst divvying out £2.2bn in dividends in the past six years.

Thames Water’s directors are now using their lobbyists to go for a really big payout. They have their insatiable, watery eyes fixed upon a “too big to fail”, banker’s-bailout-scale diversion of public money into their private coffers. Their super sewer will cost £4.2bn (half the cost of the London Olympics) and to get this money they will start by adding £29 to Londoner’s water bills from 2014. The company’s attitude to social welfare and renumeration leads us to the inevitable conclusion that a good chunk of this £4.2bn will go directly into director’s bonus packages.

“Bio-architecture” is where its at

There are other ways of easing pressure on the sewers. Rainwater can be soaked up, diverted, stored and used above ground. This reaps huge benefits for the people of London who want less concrete jungle, more jungle. Imagine if even a tiny fraction of that £4.2bn was spent on installing a comprehensive network of rainwater recycling linked to a new wave of: community vegetable patches, roof gardens and urban farms across Greater London. That kind of investment could literally transform the city and change the lives of underprivileged city residents who may currently have poor access to green space and local food.

Greening the city with new gardens and urban farms on roofs, housing estates, car parks and making use of all available dead space clearly does far more than just divert rainwater. It improves the quality of life for city dwellers offering recreation space, appealing new jobs and fresh food. The greenery reduces the urban heat-island effect, cleans the air, provides habitat for wildlife and offers new opportunities in life enhancing activities like bee-keeping, composting and fruit growing.

If the government joins up its thinking it will see that investing above ground will pay off many times more. Overall, greener cities, are better places to live and strategically their payoff increases over time. Energy prices are rising, transport fuel is becoming more scarce and the climate is changing. Ecologically productive cities use less fuel, soak up less heat, generate resources locally are more adaptable to change and better able to withstand extreme weather.

Government ministers are expected to select their ”preferred solution” – the super sewer in the summer of 2014. That gives Londoners six months to get organised. Lets fight for a good value solution that benefits us and not allow another mega rip-off to jack up the wealth divide. We don’t want a super sewer for the already filthy rich. We want a super city abundant with verdant oases.

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Rainforest – not for burning

A biofuel is any fuel recently produced by a living organism. It could be a twig that falls in your back garden that you put into your wood-burning stove. It could also be trees from a rainforest shipped to an inefficient, old power station that releases most of the energy as “waste” heat through redundant, totemic cooling towers.

Clearly, biofuels can be good or bad depending on a range of factors.

Overall, we can apply the same principles to evaluate if a biofuel is sustainable as anything else. If it is small-scale, local, regenerative and promotes biodiversity – it is sustainable. Anything else – isn’t.

Local energy – Aberdeen health campus CHP

We can imagine a hierarchy of biofuels. The best, at the top, convert local waste into a fuel. BioRegional pioneered this approach 10 years ago when they collected local tree surgeon waste to burn in their combined heat and power plant. New companies like Loowatt recognise that even human waste has a calorific value that can be used to create useful energy. There are countless other ingenious innovations converting waste streams and untapped biological productivity into useful energy, reducing the need to burn fossil fuels.

Converting agricultural land to produce biofuels is flawed and thus is lower on the biofuel hierarchy. Reducing the supply of food increases prices making it harder for the poorest in our world to get fed.

Sadly and consistently, when mega-corporations co-opt ecological solutions and lobby for them to be turned into diktats by nation states and federations of nation states the magic has totally been lost. At the bottom of our hierarchy are large-scale, structural and institutional processes that lock us in to burning forests for decades in inefficient power stations.

Drax – yes those cooling towers are wasting 70% of the fuel’s energy

The conversion of Drax power station to burn word pellets instead of coal is proudly described by the company that runs it and the supportive politicians also invested in large-scale power generation as “environmental leadership“. The switch to “sustainable biomass” is presented as a climate solution.

This is plainly absurd and demonstrates both the depths energy companies will sink to keep old power stations running and the extent to which they think the rest of us can be hoodwinked. Their hubris is mendacious.

Global supply chains are notoriously opaque. When the power station sources wood chips from global commodities markets many of those pellets will have been rainforest. Even if, as Drax claims, the wood will be from “sustainably harvested” forests in North America the process is clearly bogus.

How much carbon will be released cutting the forests down and shipping the trees to England?  Also, presumably, we are expected not to concern ourselves with the animals that live in the forest. They are omitted from their nasty little spreadsheets.

Cute forest animals do not deserve to die

It is fundamental that we are not lulled into using metrics of sustainability that miss the point. Focussing on atmospheric stability and reducing carbon emissions are useless if we ignore ecological stability. We cannot allow the last great woodland habitats on earth to be fed into furnaces to keep fuelling a global economy that, in any case, long ago abandoned improving human well being in favour of the lurching mania of humanities grim, quixotic last dance – endless work for endless consumption.

The EU policies promoting biofuels are misguided. Like the modification of the Drax power plant these policies don’t encourage lifestyle changes that can improve our well being and reduce our ecological footprint – things like promoting localization, human powered transport and local food and energy production.

Rather than reducing the use of private cars the biofuel laws keeps them running. This doesn’t benefit people or planet, only the business models based upon thermal energy systems, internal combustion engines and the people that profit from them.

Rather than stoking the fires of an economy that consumes the biosphere we could dial it down. If we all travelled and worked less we could spend more time growing food, fixing and making things caring for our young and elderly, creating art and music, dancing, cooking, pleasuring each other sexually and generally savouring existence.

Sustainability may motivate us to change but the outcome is better lives.

Local and less industrial lives require less energy – but we will still need plenty. This is no problem. Creating small-scale, local power stations creates local jobs, empowers communities, reduces fuel bills and shifts political power away from global mega-corps. Decentralising emerges as the solution to many contemporary ills.

All around us new solar panels, wind turbines and tidal arrays branch out like the first plants to emerge out of the primeval murk. They offer us a golden ticket; the journey to a future of limitless free energy in which wild spaces can be preserved, offering humans the eternal joy of a bountiful and abundant eden in which to live. In contrast, the regressive forces of conservatism seeking to keep the grim industrial furnaces fired-up to burn trees are a dark, abomination. We have to resist with every element of our biology because burning trees to power televisions is very hell.

Thomas Cole – Dream of Arcadia

The post Won’t Get Bio-Fooled Again appeared first on EcoHustler.