On March 11, 2006 – just over two years ago as I write these words – I published an article on The Earth Blog called, “Why The Public Won’t Change”, opening with the words:

Watch the streets around you - do you see a concerned populace, driving little, walking lots, happily queuing for buses, fighting for renewable electricity, demanding local produce?

Of course not - the general public really don't care about the climate. Campaigners can try and make themselves feel like they (we) are in touch with the population, but this will not happen unless they feel like the population - like they feel they don't need to care. Campaigners are, and always will be, in the minority - the public look after number 1, occasionally numbers 2, 3, 4 etc. in the form of family (although the numbers driving their kids around smog ridden streets, unsecured, chatting on their mobile phones, or slumped in front of the TV while the kids learn about the wonders of the XBox, make me doubt this) - they are not interested in saving the planet.

It’s two years on and, as much as we hear of a great raising of consciousness across the globe towards the dangers of climatic change and global environmental degradation, the picture as far as public action goes is identical. Environmental campaigners are trying to turn around an ocean going oil tanker by offering it small inducements and little taps on the sides of its vast metallic bulk – but the tanker keeps gliding onwards. I realise now, that when the article first came out I was spot on about one key thing: the public, as a body, simply don’t want to change. This applies to the vast majority of people in industrial civilization – through a combination of lifelong brainwashing and a general apathy about the condition they are in – but it doesn’t apply to everyone. As I learnt from a social analyst friend of mine, the biggest mistake campaigners and reformers have made in approaching the problem is change is that they have assumed we behave the same – as though the population really is an oil tanker. It is far better to assume that the population is like a shoal of fish, a swarm of bees or a flock of birds.

In 2006 I thought that we could take the “oil tanker” approach, by changing the systems that are causing the problems from the inside out, through government lobbying, mass consciousness raising, corporate improvement and so many other fruitless methods. It became clear that I was hopelessly wrong; and so were (and still are) the vast majority of campaigners.

I am proud of some of the essays I have written here: all of the “What If…?” articles were labours of love, and still – I think – stand up on their own. Some of the articles, such as “4 Essential Ways To Save The Earth” and “What Is The Point Of Investing In The Future If There is No Future To Invest In” badly fall down on their conclusions, even though the main text is still well worth reading. I genuinely believed that simple, wholesale solutions were possible, whereas I now understand that change will involve just a few of the fish, bees and birds amongst the teeming masses.

Changing The Minority

So, let’s assume you do want to change. Like a self-confessed alcoholic, you have placed your foot on the first step to recovery: admitting you have a problem. “I am a civilization addict”.

Civilization addicts are most definitely in the vast majority; yet as a proportion of addicts who want to recover, far more alcoholics have admitted they have a problem than those addicted to this culture of maximum harm.

It was always going to be that way: change does not happen at once, but for those groups and individuals who really think it’s going to turn around all of a sudden then that can be extremely disheartening. What they, and us recovering addicts, need to recognise is that there are only so many people capable of escaping from the trap – and those people must be the target of campaigning (or rather, treatment).

Me, I’m an innovator when it comes to changing the society I am living in. This isn’t a boast; it’s just a definition, based on the vastly overused Diffusion of Innovations concept that Everett Rogers made his own. There are five different groups of people that apply to each potential innovation – whether that be adopting a new technology, becoming interested in a television program or changing a society: innovators (which account for around 2.5% of the population), early-adopters (12.5%), early majority (35%), late majority (35%) and laggards (15%). The percentage figures can change depending on the “innovation”, but what is more important is that they reflect a time period of uptake: the early-adopters will not “take on” an innovation until the innovators have; and so on.

On its own, that seems simple enough, but that is ignoring the different stages that each individual has to go through in order for their personal adoption to be achieved. This is neatly summarised by Gregg Orr:

1) Knowledge – person becomes aware of an innovation and has some idea of how it functions,

2) Persuasion – person forms a favourable or unfavourable attitude toward the innovation,

3) Decision – person engages in activities that lead to a choice to adopt or reject the innovation,

4) Implementation – person puts an innovation into use,

5) Confirmation – person evaluates the results of an innovation-decision already made.

People in the next group are unlikely to start their adoption process until those in the previous group have, at least, started their “implementation” phase, and more likely not until the “confirmation” phase. This final phase is when the adopter decides whether they are happy with the outcome of the adoption, and is in a position to encourage others – friends, family, colleagues, neighbours – to start the adoption process themselves.

With all that said, it sounds as though any major change in society towards a survivable future is going to take an age, especially when you consider the enormous pressure placed on individuals to ensure that they don’t change at all (this is described in all its gory detail in A Matter Of Scale – which will be available in mid-2008 ) . All is not lost, though: the Diffusion of Innovations idea describes a bell-curve, meaning that once the small minority have turned their backs on industrial civilization, there is a very large group of people who may then be persuaded to do the same, followed by an even larger bulk of people doing the right thing.

In fact, by the time a sizable minority have changed, the system may well be in tatters. But the planet might still be a decent place to live on.

A darkened room, its walkways dimly illuminated by emergency lighting and the displays of monitoring equipment, rumbles with the vibrations of cooling systems injecting chilled air towards hot processors and spinning disks. The shrill sounds of thousands of data storage devices fill the air, alongside the cooling systems; the relentless blinking and trilling of green lights goes on as data is sent and received through miles of copper and glass fibre. Clunk. Warning sounds – alarming cries from dumb systems that only know that something has failed. In a wink the UPS takes up the load, drawing power not from the high voltage mains, but from deep tanks of diesel embedded in the lower levels of this data centre. Management is notified and the call goes out for emergency supplies of liquid fuel: the contract says there is to be no interruption, and the fuel suppliers are on standby 24 hours a day. The fuel suppliers are receiving further calls, from a standing start they experience a tide of demand as throughout the city the power fails: data centres, hospitals, offices, government buildings, military installations – who gets the fuel first? Who gets the last reserves?

As Anne takes her first steps towards the bathroom, she understands something is amiss. Her clock is blank; no light seeps in through the blinds from the street; her fumbled attempts to switch on the bedside lamp were to no avail. The blackness is total – even the moon won’t come out to play with the darkened surface of the world. Sirens broadcast their Doppler cries in distant parts of the town as Anne moves her left foot onto the next step down, and misses her footing…thump, thump, thump, down the stairs and into the wall; a sickening rip as her ankle bends askew. She pulls her way down the remaining steps and picks up the telephone, her breath is short – there is a tone, the telephone company keeps the system running through its own generators. She dials 9…the keypad is soundless. She hangs up then brings the receiver to her ear – nothing; the gentle burr has gone as the last diesel dries up at her local exchange.

It seems cruel to leave Anne like this; less so to let the disks in the data centre spin down – though this data centre and other like it service the largest financial organisations on Earth and tomorrow the markets won’t be opening. Anne’s plight is repeated across the nation as the switchgear reacts to low loads, shuts itself off and puts the grid into standby. The hospitals will be busy until their own power supplies drop out. The ambulances can do little but patrol – the mobile phone network failed hours ago. Like perverse moths to a doused flame, the drivers and walkers are out seeing what a darkened world looks like…for a while, until they panic.

Inexorably, the country grinds to a halt as the extinguished lights symbolise the start of turmoil in a culture whose lifeblood is electricity, and whose arteries are the cables that join the organs of state and industry together.

This is a warning: the peaks are approaching.

Peak Coal. If humans continue to burn coal at the current rate and the levels of oil burning and deforestation stay the same there is no doubt that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach 450 parts per million by the middle of the century. This is a critical tipping point. James Hansen makes the stark observation that the only way to keep carbon dioxide levels low enough for the climate to recover, in the current technology-based culture the industrial nations are exporting to the rest of the world, is to stop burning all coal. This is not happening: consumption of coal is rising as China and the USA gobble up their own supplies, and the rest of the world balks at the rising costs of (the already peaked) natural gas. Coal continues to feed the economic treadmill. The production peak will come by 2015 if we don’t switch off the burners.

Peak Uranium. As there begins a drive for carbon free energy to feed a population whose electricity demand is growing – between 1983 and 2005 electricity demand doubled worldwide – the consumption of uranium is already exceeding its production. Uranium can be made to go further, but only through the production of plutonium. Thorium breeding is experimental, and even if successful will not produce enough energy to close the nuclear gap in time. The Uranium Peak is expected some time in the middle of the 20th century – sooner if coal is abandoned.

Some options remain. Renewables have huge potential, but are being rolled out abysmally slowly, and will never catch the peaks in time. Gas, as I mentioned is already on the wane, and the use of oil products will only cut into global demand for transport – at $110 a barrel, it has already priced itself out of the mains electricity market. As mains supplies fail the industrial world’s resilience rests on a continuous supply of diesel – just one demand placed upon an industry that is now digging up sand and shale to extract the last gobs of black gold. At some point in the near future, nations will lose their electricity supplies, with dire consequences for the infrastructure, and the people that depend on it.

Those That Don’t Survive

It calls itself the “developed” world: a world where machines usurped manual craft long ago, or use the hands of the poor to serve the rabid consumption of the rich. A world in which economic growth is the measure of a nation and the ownership of material goods is the mark of the man, or the woman. A world in which leisure time bypasses nature and sucks up the money the “developed” world’s inhabitants spend their working lives accumulating.

Above all, the “developed” world is an industrial world: one that defines itself through its use of technology – its cars, its planes, its cookers, refrigerators and washing machines, its computers, its electric lawnmowers and air conditioning units, its cranes, furnaces and steel mills. A world that depends on energy.

People in countries like the USA, Japan, Canada and Germany have, in just the last 50 years, morphed from seeing the continued supply of electricity as a luxury to savour, to demanding vast quantities that run every aspect of their lives. When the electricity goes off, lives switch off. Not only will their be widespread panic, accompanied by the inevitable looting and violence which distinguishes societies that live on a psychological knife-edge; people will not be able to feed themselves for long, keep themselves warm, even drink from the taps that are kept under constant electrically pumped pressure.

The mental burdens will also be intense for many.  For those who spend their lives plugged into the mains, the loss of television, computer, telephone and even lighting will be unbearable. A hollowed-out existence in which the only veneer of life is driven by electricity seems like real life until the lights go out.

Politically, loss of power is suicide: the number one energy priority for Western governments is “security” – in other words, the need to maintain a continuous supply of power to every key part of the national infrastructure. What this really means is keeping a continuous supply of power to the economy – the money generating, trading and investing entities that stretch across the industrial world have their entire memories stored on computer disks. When the computers crash, the markets crash, and take governments down with them.

As civilisations continue to become more energy intensive, and dependent on its continuous supply, the need to secure reliable energy sources becomes ever more critical. Interference with the electricity supply of most industrial nations is considered to be an act of terrorism, even if the intention of the protagonist is to highlight the dramatic changes happening to the climate as a result of its generation. Electricity dependency creates a state of fear: fear that is generated by those that want to keep the economy, and its suckling society from collapse, and fear that results from individuals’ psychological need for artificial stimuli.

In effect, energy rich societies are under siege and, bizarrely, the attackers are those that perpetuate that energy dependence: the retailers, the advertisers, the property developers, those at the top of the heap that ride on the crest of a wave of wealth and political power. The wave is breaking, and the flotsam will be toxic for those who are in the water.

Those That Survive

In another home – a little place in the west of Scotland, in southern Nigeria, or perhaps in the south of France – a family is sitting around their wood burner, talking about the news that they picked up in the local bakery. Power cuts in the cities, darkness along the roads, civil unrest and a government that wants to crack down on dissent. Time to bring the chickens in, perhaps; the wolves could be coming to the door. There is still some oil in the lamps and stocks of candles, but at this time of the year bed time is soon after tea: as the body clock of each family member takes its cue from the darkness outside, they pump some water for teeth and a wash, then snuggle into bed, leaving the embers glowing.

Tomorrow they will take a walk into the village and find out if anyone needs help.

The Earth Blog’s “What If…” articles are thought experiments. The situations proposed are never likely to occur, but it is sometimes essential to go to extremes to see what kind of difference a positive radical change could make to the planet.

It is often said that the greatest fear of both the politician and the businessman is that somewhere, someone is doing something that he has no control over. Witness the remarkable drive to acquire cheap oil sources by the USA (Iraq – by war, Chad – by bribery, Venezuela – by engineering a coup) and China (Sudan – by bribery, Indonesia – bribery again). Witness the rush to file new patents in everything and anything: 1.7 million in 2005, up from less than 1.1 million in 1995. Anyone would think that something bad was about to happen to the global economy.

I jest, of course. The economy is fine: the rich people are still getting richer and the effects of continuing political repression, and the climate change due in the next couple of decades will only hit those poor people with flies on their eyes, and mud on their feet. Isn’t capitalism grand?

But something is changing, and it only becomes obvious when you listen to the messages very carefully indeed.

The transparent and often brutal rhetoric of the USA in environmental conferences up to and including Bali has, in the past, revealed the power of the commercial lobbyists and the way that many politicians in the USA think. It’s pretty standard stuff: first it was utter denial of the science of climate change; then it was the refusal to commit to targets which might force the commercial dinosaurs to make dramatic changes in the way they operate; and now it is the influx of corporate and political greenwash which is using all the tools in the advertisers’ box of tricks to convince the public that the problem is being dealt with and everything can carry on as normal.

The US government (along with, notably, the British government) has kept a pretty low profile when it comes to human rights abuses. The USA is one of the largest manufacturers of torture equipment in the world, exporting their wares to any government that might wish to keep troublemakers in check (I use the word “troublemaker” in the loosest possible sense), and as well as their armed forces having a history of unprovoked abuse amongst the people of occupied territories, they resolutely refuse to allow the International Criminal Court to try any of their citizens.

The motivation for this is clearly that both the businesses and the politicians want to carry on doing things the same way as always, and heaven help anyone who dares to get in their way!

So why, in June 2007 did George Bush say:

Another dissident I will meet here [in the Czech Republic] is Rebiyah Kadeer of China, whose sons have been jailed in what we believe is an act of retaliation for her human rights activities. The talent of men and women like Rebiyah is the greatest resource of their nations, far more valuable than the weapons of their army or their oil under the ground. America calls on every nation that stifles dissent to end its repression, to trust its people, and to grant its citizens the freedom they deserve.

And why, in January 2008 did he say:

Let us create a new international clean technology fund, which will help developing nations like India and China make greater use of clean energy sources. And let us complete an international agreement that has the potential to slow, stop, and eventually reverse the growth of greenhouse gases. This agreement will be effective only if it includes commitments by every major economy and gives none a free ride.

Now, with sharp light being played upon on the environmental and human rights abuses of China, a script more subtle, more clever, yet far more sinister than the simple “business as usual” theme is being written; a script which could buy the USA many more years with which to carry on its destructive activities. In the press and on the televisions of the USA future Chinese carbon emissions are being cast as demons from which we must all run screaming: they must be cut down, and the cuts must be deep. In the media, the Beijing Olympics is becoming a clarion call for journalists to explore and condemn the numerous human rights abuses carried out by the Chinese government.

Look a little closer and you realise that this isn't about creating level playing fields; it is about ensuring that the existing economic super power remains in power.

In 1990, the GDP (effectively the national wealth) of China was just under $1.9 trillion, or just 26% of the GDP of the United States. In 2005, the Chinese powerhouse economy, largely driven by exports to the USA and Europe, had grown to be worth 66% of that of the USA, despite the fact that the USA economy had grown by an impressive 56% in that period.

(Source : International Monetary Fund)

The United States government has gone into self-preservation mode against the might of China. This is nothing to do with concern for the planet, or for human rights: if it were then the USA would be cutting its own sky-high emissions to the bone rather than propping up its ailing economy with entreaties to buy more stuff, and the corporations of the USA would be criticising a regime that locks anyone away who dares speak out rather than eagerly sponsoring the Beijing Olympics.

The actions of the US government in calling for changes to other countries human rights records merely reflects their own desire to draw attention away from their own appalling record at home and around the world, and thus protect the good name of the USA. Who would want to buy goods from a country that abuses its people?

The actions of the US government in calling for half-hearted climate agreements merely reflect the corporations’ own interests in the face of potential environmental scrutiny: they try to look good, to appear environmentally responsible when in fact they are just protecting their bottom line. Who would want to buy goods from a company that contributes to climate change?

There is no doubt at all that China has to make fundamental changes to both its atrocious treatment of innocent people, and its exponential growth in climate changing greenhouse gases. There is also no doubt that the business and political leaders of the USA are being hopelessly hypocritical in so many areas by making out that China is the world’s pariah when, in fact, they are simply scared that China may one day run the world’s economy.

I need to talk to you about hope. I need to warn you about having it, for merely by having hope you could become nothing more than a bundle of ineffectual good intentions. Hope could, in fact, be the single most dangerous thing to have in the environmental struggle we need to face up to.

In order to understand hope fully we must first understand grief, for it is within the depths of grief that hope finds its most willing victims.

Grief

The Earth is not yet a dead planet, but already people are grieving its loss.

The process of grieving can be a very complex and drawn-out experience, leaping from immense highs to profound lows, not knowing what to believe or what to feel. Eventually, most people have moved from one stage to the next, backwards and forwards until they have reached the point where they accept the cause of the grief and are able to regroup and possibly move on to something else. Death may be an end, but it doesn’t have to be the end.

Surprisingly, the grieving process is evident in almost everyone who has been touched in some way by climate change and the possibility of environmental collapse. Amongst most politicians and business people in the industrial West – the consumer culture – Denial was the first stage, within themselves (although I tend to think that this was more about maintaining the status quo than coping with loss) but especially to others – if customers and citizens could be made to believe nothing was happening then nothing had to change.

We have seen how this has now panned out. Years of false scientific evidence, corporate political lobbying, and the decapitation of any agreements that dared to challenge the twin gods of wealth and power kept the denial industry in business for a long, long time. Anger has been evident amongst those who saw the truth, but that anger was suppressed, brutally in many cases, by those who sought to maintain denial. Much of that anger was diverted into symbolic actions, like protest marches, petitions and billboard campaigns; all of which achieve nothing except sate the appetite of the angry. Politicians like symbolic actions – they dissipate anger; they allow the pretence of free speech and action to be advertised to the world; symbolic actions do not threaten the system.

Meanwhile, as the protests went on, and still the chances of the planet remaining habitable for humans increased not one jot, the corporations and the politicians realised the evidence for human-induced climate change was overwhelming and so quietly slipped into Bargaining mode. Another stage of the classic grieving cycle this, in effect, has allowed inaction to continue, right up to the present day: in Bali, in Hawaii, in Scotland – wherever the powerful meet – bargaining takes place, and nothing changes. Stupidly, much of the environmental movement see this process as a positive thing – stupidly they do not see beyond the veil of ignorance: the bargaining process is just a way of making sure everything can carry on for as long as possible without anything having to change.

I see many people that I know and love hit the fourth stage – that of Depression. “It’s all over”, “there is nothing we can do”, “we may as well give up.” Give up what?

“Give up hoping”, many say. And what have you been doing all these years: hoping for change, hoping people might see sense, hoping that right will prevail above all the darkness and evil? Before we have slipped into the Acceptance stage, it seems that so many people have already given up, as though the Earth were a corpse over which we have to shed tears, over which we pour our grief, while still hanging onto a shred of hope that something good may come of all this.

Some simply say there is no point in fighting any more; that the battle is lost and the victors – the powerful individuals and bodies that become more powerful with each victory – will take the spoils, whatever tattered form they may take. For these people, there is still a chance of rekindling the desire to fight, for they have not fallen prey to hope; the hopers have already been defeated by their own blind faith.

What Is Hope?

Not all hope is bad. There are actually two types. First, the benign wish or blessing that shows you care: “I hope you have a good day”, “Hope to see you again soon”, “I hope you pass your exam.” In isolation, and as merely a gesture then this kind of hope can make someone feel wanted. This kind of hope is nice – it is harmless.

There is a second kind of hope that is not harmless; it is the kind of hope that implies more than benign wishes. I call this kind of hope the “secular prayer”; it bears all of the hallmarks of religious prayer, and carries the same dangers that are faced when you entrust your future to it. This is the dangerous form.

I want to mention the use of prayer, since I brought it up here. There appears to be no empirical evidence showing one way or another that prayer works. The Religious Tolerance web site has carefully broken down the methods, results and reaction to all of the recent major studies carried out on the effectiveness of prayer, and the conclusion you have to reach is that prayer alone simply does not have any recordable effect. The reactions that that this statement invokes are generally along the lines that God must not be tested; more specifically: "You're going to do your best to limit the prayer some people get so that you can measure the benefits for those who receive a lot of prayer? Do you think that's how God intended prayer to be used?"

So that, appears to be that. Except that when you look deeper into the research, you find something very interesting. A widely cited and carefully controlled study into the relative effects of prayer on post-operative coronary recovery found no significant difference in recovery rates between those who received prayer unknowingly and those who did not receive prayer at all. But here’s the interesting bit: the group of patients who knowingly received prayer had a 15-20% worse recovery rate than the other two groups. Some commentators (along with, surprisingly, my 10 year old daughter) suggested this was because of the increased pressure of knowing you were expected to respond to prayer, but I suspect the cause to be down to something different.

Hope.

You see, when you hope for something to happen – not the benign good wishes, but the deep, heartfelt hope that aches for an outcome of your choosing – then something happens to you: your motivation to work for the desired outcome actually reduces. In effect this is the very opposite to the meaning of “giving up hope”. By entrusting an outcome to the ethereal entity that is “hope” then you are passing on responsibility to something that is out of your control. This is what you are doing when you pray: you pass on the responsibility for the outcome of your prayers to an external force.

What appeared to be happening to the coronary patients is that by receiving and accepting prayer, part of the responsibility for that recovery went out of the control of those patients, and perhaps even out of the control of the healthcare professionals who were looking after them. A positive state of mind is often a vital attribute in recovering from illness, whether mental or physical, and also other conditions such as addiction. Quite how this works is uncertain – it may be related to the release of hormones known as Endorphins, or other more complex effects involving the immune system – but more studies than not show that maintaining positivity is beneficial. Knowing that someone cares about you enough to pray for you is one thing, though; thinking that the job of getting you better has passed from you to something you have no control over is another thing entirely.

Dereliction Of Responsibility

Every day, in all sorts of ways, we hand over the responsibility of our actions to other parties. We entrust religious leaders to act as proxy supreme beings, to give us blessings and pray for the delivery of our souls and a winner's cheque through the post for all. We entrust politicians to justly run districts, states, countries, the whole planet, on our behalf, and deliver whatever is in their jurisdiction from whatever evils we have asked them to deal with. We ask the heads of corporations to use profits wisely, to provide fair wages, allow union representation and listen to their staff and respond appropriately – we ask them not to destroy the planet. We ask environmental organisations to look after the planet on our behalf, to lobby fiercely and petition prudently, to give us a world worth living in.

We are guilty of a mass dereliction of responsibility.

Just like prayer, when we vote we hope the politicians will do the right thing after they have been elected. When we buy a product from a company, we hope that company are acting in the best interests of everyone and every thing they impact. When we sign a petition, go on a protest march or write a letter, we hope that it will change things for the better. But it is never that simple.

Voters vote for different things: your hope that a politician will increase pollution controls will be running counter to the hope of another voter that pollution controls are weakened. Your entrustment of a company that they will act ethically runs contrary to the basic needs of a shareholder in that same company, that demands an increase in profits, which requires poorer labour standards, increased use of natural resources, corner cutting and cost slashing across the board. Your petition or protest march may give you hope that something will change when in fact you have simply sublimated your anger and concern into a symbolic action that threatens not a single media executive, company director or head of state.

When was the last time you followed up one of your actions? Did you sign a petition, track the course of that petition to its target, find out the reaction of the target, question the target on why they didn’t do as you asked, spoke to them in person, exposed their ignorance in public, carried on and on and on until what you wanted to be done was done? Of course you didn’t, because you hoped that signing the petition was enough. You innocently believed that right would out simply because you placed your demands on the wings of dear hope.

Even after writing this, and knowing what I write is true, I still accidentally use the word “hope” when I really mean that I will make sure something happens. It’s a terrible habit, and one that we have all become naturalised into doing. Once we become addicted to passing the buck to someone else, it’s very difficult to take it back – but take it back we must:

“When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free – truly free – to honestly start working to thoroughly resolve it. When hope dies, action begins. “ (Derrick Jensen, Endgame)

Stop hoping, and start doing. And keep doing it until you have achieved far more than you could ever have hoped for.

Lists are useful things: shopping lists, lists of things to do, lists of addresses, lists of names and numbers, lists of articles to write. I do keep a list of articles to write, but making a list of “x ways to save the world” has never been among them. A while ago I did write an article called “4 Essential Ways To Save The Earth”, which was not exactly a list (it was over 6000 words long), more a way of describing the types of systems that have to be changed. But it was a good way of putting my thoughts in order.

Then the environmental blogs started to fill up, much like the environmental books had years before, with lists and lists of things you should do in order to be a good green person. Meanwhile the Earth carried on heating, the forests continued to be cleared, the oceans became more acidic and the population kept growing and consuming more and more. I have not seen a single list that actually takes people to a genuinely sustainable place, let alone addresses the root causes of our situation.

It’s about time that was put right.

Not too long ago I visited a school to talk about climate change, and realised that I would probably be asked to tell the students what they should be doing to make things better. Buy organic milk; recycle more; change your lightbulbs; do lots of other really trivial things that on their own will have virtually no impact. How could I get around this problem without frightening the students into retreat, leaving them confused as to the best actions or giving them something that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on?

Finally, after some time breaking things down, analysing everything I know about the way systems (cultural and ecological) work, throwing out the trivial stuff and talking to my 10 year old daughter, I whittled everything down to just 6 main subject headings. They need a little explanation individually, as does the thought behind them. Essentially, if you take them all together and if a large enough number of people follow them, two things will happen:

1) Humanity will become far more sustainable, reversing the trends we are seeing in our consumption and damaging activities.

2) The systems that drive this culture’s terrible behaviour will break down, having no option but to change or die.

Each action taken alone is enough to fundamentally change and even take down one or more of the damaging systems that the industrial world makes us think are essential – they are not. These systems include the motor industry, the industrial food production system, the corporate fiscal system and many others. Many of them are interlinked and dependent upon each other, and when one falls, others can fall too. The real beauty of the 6 Things You Must Do is that they are all eminently achievable: they can be completed in one go or in steps, and you can concentrate on one or two at a time, so long as you get there by 2030, the year that we have to have become sustainable if we are to prevent runaway and irreversible environmental change.

I am not saying that the 6 Things are easy to achieve. People have been hardwired in the West, and increasingly in other parts of the world to behave in a certain way – an orthodoxy – which even the environmental organisations take as read. Not only is our behaviour controlled and thus difficult to change without considerable motivation, there are many things that are not achievable without fundamental changes taking place in society. But behaviour is the most important. You may think you are making great sacrifices, but you are actually making your life far more satisfying and in tune with how humans naturally behave.

So, here are The 6 Things You Must Do, if you want to ensure that we have a future on Earth:

CONNECTING : Get back in touch with your planet. You are part of nature so act as though you are. Understand your place in nature, how you affect it and how it affects you.

CONSUMING : Don't buy anything that you don't need. If you have to buy something, remember the 4 R's: Reduce, Repair, Reuse and Respect.

EATING : Become vegan, or as near as you can to remain healthy. Buy local. Eat simply.

LIVING : Reduce the energy used in your home to the bare minimum. Change your behaviour to allow for this. Become energy independent.

TRAVELLING : Travel as little as possible. Don't fly. Don't drive. Instead: walk, cycle, use the bus, go by train.

EDUCATING : Convince yourself and everyone you know - children, parents, politicians, teachers - that we need to change completely and we need to change now.

Simple, challenging and very effective. If you want more details then write to me at keith@theearthblog.org. There will be a lot more information and help in my forthcoming book, A Matter Of Scale – watch this space.

It is 3:30 in the morning as the cold winter air paws at the roof tiles, and the drizzle softly obscures the blind windows of our sleeping house. In a chilly annex, unseen, a valve opens, and the water begins flowing; the gentle ticking of the water meter in the kitchen disturbs no one. I turn over and continue my sleep, warm and dry under the duvet. The water continues flowing, 3 litres, 4..5…for minute after minute, creating a deep, warm pool, soaking everything it touches. I am unaware, dreaming of things I will have no recollection of upon waking.

It is 7:20 in the morning. I ease myself from the bed and pad downstairs. The ground floor is cold, I need a coffee and a shower. I stop and notice a tiny unobtrusive light out of the corner of my eye through the small panes of glass in the back room doorway. “Please Remove Washing”, announces the LCD array – polite, if ever a machine could be so. I decide to have my coffee and shower, and then hang out the clothes that completed their overnight wash cycle 3 hours ago.

The fridge and freezer are still humming away, and on dark mornings I need some light, a burst of news on the radio and a mug of coffee for my wife and I. Actually, I say “need”, but really it’s “want”; although by the looks on the faces of some people who come to visit, and the determination to keep their coats on because my thermostat is set to a balmy (for me) 17°C , you would think my house was located somewhere in a world without power. Actually, it’s probably located somewhere in the 1960s, when lighting, heating and home appliances in the industrial West were used far more frugally than now. Between 1970 and 2004, according to the UK government, the amount of energy used for space heating and water heating in the UK increased by 22%. In the same period the energy use for lighting and appliances increased by a massive 148%.

The more significant change has been in the fuel type used in this period. Solid fuels burned at home, like coal and wood, decreased in usage from just over 18 to less than 1 million tonnes of oil equivalent. At the same time natural gas increased from 9 to 34 mtoe, while electricity from the national grid increased from just under 7 to nearly 10 mtoe. Overall, people in the UK have increased their domestic energy consumption by nearly 32%; and this in a land without air conditioning. It is to the USA that we have to go to see some really fascinating figures.

According to the US Department of Energy there has been a massive shift in the way energy used in the home is produced. In 1970 United States homes used 206 million tonnes of oil equivalent in “primary consumption”, meaning that the fuel – such as coal, wood or butane – was burnt in or around the home. In the same year 135 mtoe was drawn from the national grid in the form of electricity. By 2004, the figure for primary consumption had gone down by 16%, reflecting the move away from solid fuels. By 2004, the consumption of electricity had gone up by 160% or, if you like, the USA consumed 2.3 times as much electricity in 2004 as it did only 34 years earlier. The USA consumes a lot of electricity!

Ok, so what has that to do with a washing machine running during the night? For the answer to that, we need to look at the way electricity is produced.

Demand Issues

I grew up in the 1970s in the UK, during a time when power cuts due to industrial action, or more commonly due to equipment failure or damage, were pretty common, much as they are now in many poorer countries throughout the world. I remember playing Monopoly by candle light, and vaguely recall television programmes sometimes only running for a short period during the day to reduce power consumption. I don’t remember being cold and miserable – we had clothes to put on for when the weather became uncomfortable, and we had fun, playing games, telling stories, and would have played music if any of us had been able to.

In 2007, in the industrial West, a person who switches on a light expects it to work immediately, and stay working. The demand (amount of electricity required) varies tremendously throughout the day; the graph for the UK is relevant for most industrial countries with a normal working day, although there are seasonal variations:

(Source: http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/Data/Demand+Data/)

The “base load” can be seen by the red block, moving up and down gradually depending on the weather. The daily load is demonstrated by the vertical lines which show that the highest demand (around 5.30pm) is something like 75% higher than the lowest demand (around 6am).This is a big problem.

This demand for constantly changing amounts of electricity contrasts with the way in which that electricity is produced. For the USA, where 50% of electricity is produced by coal, turning up the power is not like turning on a light switch. A source at Drax Power Station (which provides 7% of the UK’s electricity, and produces 4% of its carbon dioxide) told me that a coal-fired power station stores high pressure steam, which allows about 10% more power to be generated in a matter of seconds. After this initial burst, enough coal has to be available to produce the steam for that additional load until it is no longer needed.

In the UK, coal and gas each supply about 37% of total electricity. For a gas-fired power station the response time is less than 5 minutes – no good at all if everyone in the country instantaneously turned their kettles on, but good enough for the real world. In France, where over 78% of electricity is generated by nuclear power stations response times are much trickier to deal with. A nuclear power station doesn’t respond quickly to demand – 2 days is about the fastest time the power could be made available. The way France gets round this is by having 20% or so in the form of hydro electricity, which can be produced on demand, along with other methods, such as having agreements with large users to reduce their demand when required.

Nuclear power stations do not stay running all the time, in fact they are a major source of intermittency due to their large size and tendancy to develop minor faults. Wind turbines – which have gained an unjustified reputation for intermittency – are not really a problem as wind can be predicted accurately; as such they could provide as much as 25% of electricity in many countries. But there is a problem, and it’s a big one: if a 90% reduction in carbon dioxide by 2030 is going to be achieved by industrial nations (yes, it is necessary!) then there is only so much tinkering in the electricity infrastructure that can take place. We need large amounts of renewables; we need to dramatically cut the use of coal and gas (in that order); we are generally unhappy about having pools of nuclear waste lying around; and we want to keep the lights, our refrigerators, our TVs, our computers, and everything else that requires electricity on. It’s not going to happen without some drastic changes in thinking.

Changing Behaviour

The way that variations in electricity demand are dealt with is known as Load Management, and in its way it is a very clever system. But that assumes that we are prepared to put up with vast quantities of carbon dioxide emissions – we may, but the planet certainly isn’t, and it will rebel if pushed too far! In fact “load management” is no more managing the load than a water company “manages” it’s floodwaters by opening more sluice gates. The load is merely being coped with. Management must take place at the demand side as well.

First of all, and I cannot stress this enough, the overall demand must go down, down, down. A 90% cut in carbon emissions by 2030 is just over 9% a year for the next 23 years. An initial 9.5% cut is very easy: just change all of your lights to energy saving versions and watch TV less – that should do it. The next year’s cut is a bit more difficult: switching every light bulb off that you don’t need, only boiling the precise amount of water you need, making sure nothing is left on standby – that kind of thing. It gets progressively harder as the “quick wins” are used up – you may have to move the fridge and freezer into a cooler room, change appliances, change your lifestyle. But in fact it’s not really that hard when you think about it, because although the first 9.5% cut is easy, it is also the largest cut of them all: 9.5% of your original total compared to the 3rd cut which only needs an extra 7.8% shaved off your original consumption.

You are also getting used to the idea of using less energy and are, without realising it, undergoing a shift in behaviour. Little changes can make a huge difference if they keep happening: “Doing your bit” is not a one-off activity, it is a continuous process of improvement through which your “bit” becomes a whole lot of dramatic change. In 2020 you will only need to cut a further 3% from your original total, which is dead easy when you think about it; especially for someone who has been changing their behaviour for 12 years.

And here’s a clever thing, and the reason for all the talk about load management: why not change the time during which you do things? The peak load will always be around 5.30 in the evening, and the lowest demand will always be in the early hours of the morning. Now, remember my washing machine which did its wash cycle while I was asleep? By moving the time during which appliances do their work, you could help be responsible for shutting down every coal-fired power station on your electricity grid. It’s not that difficult; simply by running your existing washing machines, dishwashers, vacuum cleaners and steam irons between 2.30am and 11.00am rather than in the afternoon or evening, the overall load will balance out, and the dirty coal-fired power stations will be out of a job.

If everyone did their clothes washing in the early hours of the morning then in the UK that would mean between 6000 and 7000 gigawatt hours of electricity a year wouldn’t need to be supplied by coal – that is 5.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, or a quarter of Drax Power Station’s entire annual output. One percent of the UK’s entire carbon emissions removed just by running washing machines overnight. If this was carried out in the USA another 27.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide wouldn’t have to be generated by coal. A Night Shift would be a great start to ridding the world of coal-fired power stations.

As I have said, the first priority is reducing your electricity demand, plus reducing your emissions from transport, water heating, space heating, the energy required to manufacture billions of consumer goods each year, and the energy wasted in producing and transporting food around the world. You can do that, bit by bit, until almost all of it is gone. But while you are doing that, think of the Night Shift, too.

“Fair and Lovely” advert, Unilever Pakistan.

It was one day in 2003, perhaps, when we used to have milk delivered to our door early enough for it not to become curdled by the sun, that something struck me as odd: there was no cream at the top. I have no idea when my milk actually lost the cream at the top, but going by a New Scientist question, I guess it was a few years before that. The change had been slipped in quietly enough so that few people noticed; but the upshot was that milk buyers no longer had the choice whether to mix the cream with the milk, or use it separately. The milk supply had become homogenised – the same all the way through – and try as you might, homogenised milk cannot be separated again.

I mention this because when I thought up the title of this article, it seemed that one of the problems with Homogeneity was that hardly anyone would know what it meant! Such is the nature of homogeneity: it is subtle, pervasive and irreversible, just like the milk in my fridge. When James Watson made the public statement that he felt African development policies would fail because African intelligence was “not the same” as that of white Americans or Europeans, he stepped into a furnace of denial and anger. To make the suggestion that there is any difference in the intelligence of black and white people meant that Watson was deemed to have, “gone beyond the point of acceptable debate.”

But who says whether this kind of debate is acceptable or not? Surely all debate is acceptable, and disallowing it is denying people the freedom to speak openly and honestly about what they feel. What seems clear to me from a quick look at the various studies on standardised IQ tests and race, is not that the differences make any one race look inferior to another, but simply that standardised tests only work when they are applied to a standardised population. In some peoples’ eyes, though, merely saying that there are differences based on ethnic origin is enough to take you off their Christmas card list for life. That’s a risk I’ll have to take.

Instead of taking a blinkered view of this planet, its human inhabitants and the way in which we should merrily slip into a warm melting pot, pretending that everyone is just about the same, I want us to celebrate our differences. I want us to appreciate the natural, physical human differences that have evolved over tens of thousands of years; and in doing so help us to understand why homogeneity may not be something we should be striving for in the long term.

(Letter to Mr Farnish: ”I was disgusted to read that you thought it was acceptable to show the differences between people from different parts of the world. As you know, we are all the same…”)

Dr. Orva:         Here, smoke this. And be sure you get the smoke deep down into your lungs.
Miles Monroe:  I don't smoke.
Dr. Orva:         It's tobacco. It's one of the healthiest things for your body.

(Sleeper, 1973, Dir. Woody Allen)

I feel like an eco-fraud. There’s me thinking that we should be protecting the land, the sea and the atmosphere from the profit motives of large corporations, and then a big group of like-minded people come along with a signed document saying the opposite and repeatedly hit you round the face with it.

All the time I have been trying to do the right thing but now it seems that I have been wrong all along: the corporations and the national governments of the world can be trusted to look after the planet.

What a load of crap.

Time was, when the Rainforest Action Network, Greenpeace and Friends Of The Earth were the kind of organisations that did really good things; clever things that showed that they weren’t just mindless Luddites, but intelligent, joined-up organisations with only the best interests of the biosphere in mind – maybe they still are. But what have they gone and done? Signed a document that effectively condones the handing over of the last unclaimed element on Earth to private interests. Read this:

By auctioning pollution allowances, we affirm that no one has a “right” to pollute. Instead, we claim the atmosphere as a common resource, to be managed for the benefit of the public, which no polluter may foul without due compensation.

By auctioning pollution allowances, we reduce the societal cost of achieving emission reductions, enabling America to achieve its climate protection goals with less disruption to our economy and the lives of individual Americans.

And by auctioning pollution allowances, we prevent the accumulation of billions of dollars in windfall profits by polluters, and instead put those revenues to work on behalf of the public. Allowance revenues can support efforts to transform America into a clean energy economy and to provide a regular dividend or rebate to American consumers.

We call on state and federal lawmakers to limit global warming emissions to the levels demanded by the science and to auction all pollution allowances in any cap-and-trade program.

(US PIRG, 2007 : my emphasis)

This makes me feel a little queasy. At first sight we read that the many organisations and individuals who have countersigned the document, of which this is an extract, are requesting a tightening of the rules that govern the way that carbon trading credits are issued. All well and good. Then you realise that the same signatories are actually condoning future carbon trading, and defending the economic system that brought us the climate crisis in the first place. That’s what makes me queasy. In effect, this statement says, “It’s ok for us to hand over the keys to the atmosphere to corporations, providing they pay for it.”

This is being supported by just about every mainstream environmental organisation in the USA!

Trading The Air : Another Viewpoint

Cap and Trade, the mechanism that this statement refers to, is a way of bringing Contraction and Convergence into the commercial world. Contraction and Convergence is basically a method of combining the necessary reduction of greenhouse gases with the equal distribution of the ‘right’ to emit those greenhouse gases. Of course, no one has the ‘right’ to emit greenhouse gases in reality – we share the biosphere with all other living organisms, and no organism except for humans expects any rights, especially not to put agents of global warming into the air. Non-human organisms just live, and die. However, at least with a mechanism like C&C the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and so on, that is emitted, is not dictated by the amount of money you have in the bank, or how many tanks or missiles you have.

Cap and Trade, on the other hand, goes beyond the concept of a mutually agreed limit and share, and puts the various baskets of greenhouse gases into the marketplace. What has happened is that rather than saying, “Here’s your limit, don’t go beyond it,” the people supporting Cap and Trade are saying, “Here’s your limit, but you can go over it providing you have the cash.”

The place where Contraction and Convergence fell down was not in the original idea, which was brilliantly simple and effective, but in the acceptance that the allowances could be traded. Again, in principle, some element of trading seems inevitable while heavily polluting countries bring down their emissions; but why must this be so? Surely the only guaranteed way of bringing down emissions and ensuring they stay there is to make sure that each human being has an agreed limit on their personal greenhouse gases (say 1 tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent per year by 2030). If a rich country or region cannot bring down its emissions to that level for its population then they must pay an appropriate fine into a central ‘pot’ used for global climate initiatives. The fine would be sufficiently large to ensure it hurts. The fine would not be used to pay for the ‘right’ to emit by proxy, it would be used to counteract the damage caused by the country or region on a global scale, because that country or region is clearly not capable of dealing with the problem themselves.

Meanwhile, should another country or region be below it’s emissions allowance then, hooray! They don’t get money from the failing party in trade-offs, but they can use a share of the money from the global ‘pot’ not being used for large-scale climate initiatives, to ensure their emissions do not rise.

There are, at the time of writing, only 23 years left to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 60%. If the fines are large enough, then the offending countries will have to act quickly. If they pay large fines then there will be sufficient funds to protect the climate in the intervening period, for instance by placing an enormous area of rainforest in trust (a Common Good), or investing huge amounts of money into public transportation systems.

At no point does any of that money have to be traded, less so have anything to do with ‘the market’.

The Pernicious Market

I spent 9 years managing IT systems for a large financial organisation. I’m not proud of this, but I will say that it made me very aware of what lengths corporations will go to in order to protect their bottom lines. You will, no doubt, be aware that any incorporated business, be it an Inc., a GmbH, a Ltd. or an S.A., has many of the same legal rights as an individual. Not only that, but corporations lack any collective moral obligation – how can a company decide what is right or wrong? There lies the dichotomy: they have the rights of an individual, yet do not have to follow the rules that an individual does! If a person dies as the result of another person’s neglect then they will probably go to prison. If an employee dies as a result of a corporation’s neglect, the corporation will have to pay a fine. Maybe.

If a person is caught throwing the contents of their garbage can in a protected area then they will be fined, and may be jailed. If a corporation announces that they have emitted 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere then, well,  they will just have to go and buy some carbon credits.

Everything can be traded on the market, even lives.

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon on Tuesday abandoned a plan to establish a futures market that would have allowed traders to profit by correctly predicting assassinations and terrorist strikes in the Middle East.

(Associated Press, July 29, 2003)

The resulting uproar in the House and the Senate was not unexpected, but think of it this way: the economic system that exists in the majority of the world’s rich nations does not have any explicit rules banning what can be traded. If there is a market for war then, providing enough people want to trade War Futures then that market will be liquid. If there is a market in coal, bauxite, uranium, plutonium, carbon dioxide – well, what the hell. Let’s make a killing.

This culture is screwed up!

The Moral Question

As seems obvious now, we cannot trust the market to play fair with our climate. From a simply mechanistic point of view, the climate crisis is not going to be solved by turning it into some kind of big trading experiment. But my problem with having a market in greenhouse gases goes far deeper than that.

It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I first heard Satish Kumar of Resurgence speaking. He was addressing a conference related to economics and the environment. What he said was so obvious that at first I didn’t think I had heard anything new; but he had said something new, or rather something that seems to have been purposefully ignored by those with a vested interest:

“Carbon emissions trading is simply a way of privatising the atmosphere.”

Our air is now going to be chopped up into myriad global packets, into which each nation has certain rights to pump greenhouse gases. Forget the fact that the atmosphere and its greenhouse gases do not respect national boundaries; the rich nations and their corporations are buying the atmosphere from the Earth and there is no way they are giving it back. Once something is in private ownership then the only way of making it a Common Good once again is to buy it back. Who is going to buy it back, and for whom?

Morally, humans have no more right to pollute than any other organism; we complain of animal infestations, algal blooms, swarms of insects, and then try and fix the problems with deadly force to the organisms responsible, not realising that even in these cases humans may be to blame. What about accepting that the atmosphere is not ours to fill with greenhouse gases and then just agreeing not to fill it with greenhouse gases? Wouldn’t that be a good idea? Wouldn’t that be the right thing to do?

The atmosphere is not for sale.

Do you feel like breaking the law today? If you don’t then I apologise profusely because, depending on where you live, you may have already broken it – just by looking at the picture at the top of this article. It’s not a very good picture because the water looks like snow, but if you want to look a bit more, I won’t tell. Go on, have a look at the trees in the middle of the lake and surrounding it; at the ivy climbing upwards; at the still water on a cold February day; at the security fence halfway up on the right-hand side.

You’re not allowed to look at this. Liberating, isn’t it?

On the day this photograph was taken an activist called The Ant nearly died. His life was only saved because a quick thinking police officer managed to manually stem the copious blood that was pumping from his left arm. The reason the blood was pumping from The Ant’s left arm was because he had tried to escape from a police cell. The reason he had tried to escape from a police cell is that he needed to get back to the protest camp at Radley Lakes, Oxfordshire, where trees were being felled in rapid succession. The reason he was in the police cell is because he had tried to stop the trees from being felled.

The reason you may have broken the law is because the photo was taken from a position where journalists and the public are no longer permitted to film, and thus you are not permitted to see any such photos taken during the course of the injunction period.

The Radley Lakes protest has been well documented. There is a web site, and there are reams of newspaper articles – local, national and international – discussing the various machinations of the legal system that have allowed RWE to fill an important wildlife habitat (isn’t every habitat important?) with toxic fly ash: the remnants of burning coal to produce electricity. In the course of this toxic lake occupation, RWE have been at pains to ensure that any trees that could contain nesting birds have been removed prior to the nesting season.

This is wrong on so many levels, yet the vast majority of RWE’s actions have been perfectly reasonable in the eyes of the law. You don’t believe me? Here is an extract from the charge sheet related to The Ant’s arrest and subsequent injury:

“Other security officers have [sic] been alerted and have [sic] turned up to detain the defendant. The defendant was seen sprinting towards one of the contractors using the chainsaw. Fortunately the security men stopped the defendant before he could get to the contractor.”

Read that again: “Fortunately the security men stopped the defendant…” Fortunately for who? Had “the defendant” reached the chainsaw operator, what would have happened? Would he have thrown himself on the chainsaw? Would the operator have turned around with the chainsaw blades whizzing and decapitated The Ant? Would the chainsaw operator have stopped felling the tree?

Read what you will into the charge sheet; to me the implication is clear: “Fortunately the defendant was not able to stop the felling of trees.”

In case you think I’m being paranoid, here is a direct quotation from the 3rd charge laid on The Ant, entitled “Obstruct / disrupt person engaged in a lawful activity”:

“On 14/02/2007 at Radley, in the County of Oxfordshire, having trespassed on land in the open air, namely Sandels Thrupp Lane in Radley, and in relation to a lawful activity, namely Cutting Down Trees, which persons were engaged in on that land, did an act, namely Climbing over Fence & running towards chain saws, which you intended to have the effect of disrupting that activity.”

Do you feel like breaking the law now?

Pulling Punches

Last week I received a newsletter through the post from Greenpeace UK. It explained in detail the campaigns that are currently taking place and the successes that Greenpeace UK has achieved. I’ve been a member of Greenpeace for many years, and working with my local group gave me my first taste of activism – but it was only a taste. The Greenpeace newsletter reported on the reduction in cod that Birds Eye had made to their fish finger recipe, and how campaigners had removed incandescent light bulbs from Woolworths stores around the country. The word ‘modest’ springs to mind.

WWF in the USA, recently announced with great fanfare this year that one of their major campaigns had led to the establishment of a sustainable tuna fishery…consisting of 21 boats. The world tuna fleet totals between 2000 and 3000 vessels, that’s less than 1% of the total fleet – way to go! For another campaign they are asking ‘activists’ to make polite phone calls to a senator between the hours of 9am and 5pm, so that he kicks off a hearing on the Law of the Sea Convention. The Government must be quaking in their boots.

The Sierra Club (the largest environmental organisation in the USA) have, on the other hand, accounced their victory in stopping FEMA selling temporary mobile homes that may have high levels of formaldehyde in them. Oh, wait a minute, Fema are going to “reconsider” whether to carry on selling these trailers, but in the meantime they are still selling the trailers. But all is not lost; while their leaders make axis-shifting speeches, supporters are being encouraged to fly around the world so they can see wild places, and have a great adventure. I fancy Memorable Madagascar, for only $3945, and I get to fly twice more when I get there – count me in, carbon fans!

All of these campaigns and activities, I assume, are carried out with the best of intentions, and not just to make the participants feel good about themselves. The only thing is, they will not make a blind bit of difference in the long run.

It becomes increasingly clear – the more you look at them - that most of the campaigns fought by large environmental groups not only sit squarely in the comfort zone of that group’s supporters and leaders, but also conveniently sit in the comfort zones of the very companies and governments the campaigns are targeted at. Not only that, but the law as it stands is almost always fully respected – do these organisations never get angry?

I love this planet. I had better do, because it’s the only one that we have got. I get angry, very angry, at the acts of violence carried out to our planet by those who should - and do - know better. Derrick Jensen wrote, “Love does not imply pacifism”. I could not have put it better myself.

Real Activism

Earth First! was founded for precisely the reasons above. Their web site reads: “Earth First! was named in 1979 in response to a lethargic, compromising, and increasingly corporate environmental community. Earth First! takes a decidedly different tack towards environmental issues. We believe in using all the tools in the tool box, ranging from grassroots organizing and involvement in the legal process to civil disobedience and monkeywrenching.”

Civil disobedience? Monkeywrenching? Surely that implies breaking the law! Too right, it does. Breaking the law is utterly necessary where the law fails to protect the environment, or crushes those people who wish to make changes for the better. The long, exhausting and almost always illegal fight against apartheid in South Africa prior to 1990 should be a clarion call to environmental campaigners:

“The youth took to the streets, with the Heyta! Ta! Heyta! Ta Ta! of the toyi-toyi resounding in the townships. The targets of these protests were often the local community councils, which were seen as puppets of the apartheid state.

“Resistance spread rapidly, and by 1985, many townships in South Africa had become ‘ungovernable’. At this point, trade unions and particularly COSATU, with the aid of the church, spearheaded resistance.” (from http://www.apartheidmuseum.org/supplements/issue5/index.html)

As protests continued to spread, the power of the police was increased by the Botha government, and eventually a violent deadlock was reached. Few people, I’m sure, would have wished to be a black activist in South Africa in the late 1980’s, but at the same time who could possibly deny that law-breaking activism was essential.

You see, the apartheid laws in South Africa had been created specifically so that anyone opposing apartheid would be in breach of them. The laws in most nations of the world are created in order to protect the interests of financial, commercial and land-owning bodies.  These laws, which most environmental campaigns happily observe, are there to protect the systems that are destroying the planet.

If a logging company wishes to destroy an ancient forest in Canada and they have been granted a permit to do so, it is a crime to stop them doing so. It is a crime to save the habitat that will be lost forever.

If a bauxite mining company in Jamaica wishes to dump toxic waste into pristine lakes and the government has given permission for this to happen, it is a crime to stop the company’s mining operations. It is a crime to protect local people’s drinking water.

If a coal fired power station in the UK is emitting 4% of the entire country’s carbon dioxide and the government considers it a part of the Critical National Infrastructure, then it is a crime to shut down the operations of this power station. It is a crime – akin to terrorism – to try and prevent the planet from dying.

Do you understand?

In our modern, comfortable society, we see The Ant as abnormal; getting so angry about what is happening, and fighting in a manner which puts him perilously close to death. But the mad people aren’t the fighters; the mad people are the sheep who meekly accept the culture of consumption and the laws that keep them there.

Asked if he would, with hindsight, go through the prison cell  trauma again if he knew what would happen, The Ant said: “Hindsight is a lovely thing to have when things go badly wrong. Us hardcore non-violent campaigners can only do what is in our heart. That’s one of the big problems with humans, they think with their ‘head’ not their ‘heart’. I would try and save life again, risking my own life, because all life is worth saving.”