musings

Getting ready for action!

Today, activists from Greenpeace Islington campaigned at Shell’s garage on Holloway Road against Shell’s plans for oil exploration in the Arctic.  Other North London groups – Camden, Bethnal Green and Walthamstow were simultaneously taking action at Shell stations around the city. Since Thursday, when news of Lucy Lawless and Greenpeace NZ activists’ occupation of a Shell ship bound for Alaska broke out, Greenpeace local groups across Europe have been campaigning at their local Shell stations as the battle to #savethearctic begins.

Every time I participate in on-the-street activism, whether its getting the public to sign petitions or leafleting an area, I find myself reflecting on the potential contribution of our little action to the wider campaign. Today I felt our presence at the Shell station had an effect on Shell’s employees. We were watched throughout our action suggesting our presence was perturbing. What was especially rewarding was when a few station staff spoke with us after their shift and sympathised with the campaign aims. Fantastic!

We managed to speak to many motorists as they left the station as well as many pedestrians. It’s always rewarding speaking to actual people on the streets. Sometimes we speak with people who are simply unaware of the destruction being caused to the planet and our role is to plant a seed in their head. Hopefully these people will reflect on our exchange and might, down the line, support a worthy environmental campaign. Other times we speak with really passionate supporters and our role here is to mobilise these people because, we believe, our collective people power can save the planet. And of course not everyone is interested in hearing what we have to say – least of all the guy that ran away from us shouting “I love oil”. Oh dear.

Nevertheless, we had a successful session today and it’s a wonderful feeling of solidarity knowing other activists around the city, the country and elsewhere are simultaneously taking action to save our beautiful arctic, our awe-inspiring planet’s last great frontier. This is such an important campaign – one that I envision will be long and bitterly fought but I know we won’t give up. This is just the beginning. Whether it’s occupying ships, unfurling banners atop buildings, signing online petitions, campaigning on the streets or lobbying behind closed doors, each and everyone of us has an important part to play to #savethearctic. And #savethearctic we will. 

Floe Piece - Performance by Liberate Tate at the Tate Modern, 14 Jan 2012 

The Corporate Occupation of the Arts was an inspiring afternoon of talks at Bank of Ideas from those involved in using art as a political tool. The afternoon started with Platform, the campaigning organisation working to expose the link between corporate (e.g. BP, Shell) sponsorship of cultural institutions and their social licence to operate. Are we complicit in these corporations’ destructive activities when we visit these institutions? The average person on the street isn’t thinking about the social and environmental destruction caused in out-of-sight-out-of-mind places and probably ends up viewing such corporations favourably by associating them with a positive cultural experience. Such sponsorship deals also allow corporations to make strong links with cultural and political decision makers opening the door to public policy.  A year ago I was confronted by this issue when I attended a conference on resource security and climate change at the Royal Geographical Society, an institution sponsored by Shell. I wouldn’t be surprised if the climate scientists, social scientists and politicians speaking at the conference take (or are subtly encouraged to take) an uncritical stance towards Shell. Seeing Shell’s logo changed my view of the conference – While I can’t concretely prove it, my hunch is the issue under discussion would be defined and debated differently if it was hosted at a different institution not controlled by oil money.

One of my highlights of the afternoon was The Art School and the Cultural Shed by John Beck (Newcastle University) and Matthew Cornford (University of Brighton). The Art School and the Cultural Shed documents the decline of the publically funded art school where ordinary students once could get a free education, and the rise of the iconic (often empty) museum designed by rock star architects. I am always moved by beautiful buildings but am often saddened by great designers who fail to understand buildings are NOT sculptures and actually have a social purpose! The built environment and subsequent lifestyles are essentially produced and reproduced by investment choices of the political economy– this is true from transport to galleries to office spaces. At any given time – from Amsterdam in the Dutch Golden Age to housing estates – the built environment is a physical manifestation of the ruling political ideology. Even London’s exponential growth into a megalopolis happened in the 19^th century when the British Empire was at its height. Architects, artists and others who fail to consider how the situation in which they are creating in came to be are implicit in the reproduction of the ruling political ideology, and the social and environmental impacts that go along with it.

My afternoon at Occupy LSX ended with Liberate Tate’s performance Floe Piece, a block of arctic ice that was taken by four black veiled mourners on a funeral pyre to Tate Modern. We followed the funeral procession from Occupy LSX to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall where the piece of arctic ice was laid down. People gathered around and many were curious about the performance. Being curious is the first step of engagement and it was magical to see art’s possibility to engage. It was a good twenty or so minutes before the security guards cottoned on that this was an unsanctioned performance. The security guards confusion reminded me of what Liberate Tate had said earlier that afternoon: art spaces allow more time for protest.

Many artists don’t use their art for political means and indeed whose right is it to say what is or isn’t the right role for art? Each generation determines art’s meaning for itself. But this much I know: the political economy determines the nature of our civilization and surely we should use all our tools to make a just, peaceful and beautiful world?

This blog post gives me an opportunity to reflect not just on the contents of IIED’s book Virtuous Circles: Values, Systems and Sustainability but also on the principles of sustainability and my own research on sustainable consumption.

Virtuous Circles is an output of the IIED coordinated Designing Resilience project that provides information and advice to decision makers on how to create an alternative and sustainable future. The project is being trialed as small-scale initiatives in communities within the Latin American and Caribbean region. A key message of Virtuous Circles is that current industrial and economic cycles are linear and it is this linearity that is the crux of our ecological unsustainability. The alternative, therefore, is circular systems. Although “circular metabolism” and “closing the loop” are not new phrases, it is worth pausing here for a few moments to reflect on this crucial concept. All dominant systems - from energy to food to manufacturing – require large amounts of external inputs that are dependent on fossil fuels, continuous extraction of virgin materials and/ or the unsustainable harvesting of renewable resources. On the other end, vast amounts of waste are produced in the form of air pollution, greenhouse gases, toxic water pollution, and land fill waste. Virtuous Circles argues the alternative to such a linear system is to minimise external inputs by integrating various systems (from energy to food to water to housing etc) so that one system’s waste is another system’s input.  Such an approach basically mimics nature – nature is made of many cycles and, left untouched, nothing is wasted. Biodiversity is key to the absence of waste. In any ecosystem all biological waste can only be used back into the system if the system is diverse enough as different organisms have differing food requirements. Biodiversity is nature’s way of converting waste into resources. Biodiversity creates a powerful argument why monocultures, prevalent in our civilization, are inherently unsustainable.

Virtuous Circles focuses mainly on food and agriculture systems but demonstrates how a sustainable system of food provision is actually integrated into effective water, energy, waste management and building systems. Virtuous Circles also argues small scale and fair trade initiatives are key because such types of institutional arrangements can develop and foster the kind of knowledge that is required to practice and promote ecological sustainability. Such institutional arrangements also allow for the majority to have access to secure and fulfilling livelihoods. Countless inspiring case studies are documented within the book. The book also makes several recommendations. The two that stand out to me are: the emphasis on designing and implementing a major eco-literacy programme to raise awareness of the hidden environmental and social problems caused by our current linear systems; and the need to create training centers and institutions to develop the new skills and knowledge base required to implement circular systems. Virtuous Circles also makes the point that circular systems allow for growth in a balanced way and so challenges the widely held assumption that no growth is the only sustainable alternative to the current unsustainable linear growth model – a point that underlies the argument in my research: quality and type of growth is key, not growth per se. It is possible to have positive and enriching growth in circular systems.

Virtuous Circles is an output of research in developing countries but the ideas and learnings are equally pertinent in affluent countries like the UK as principles of sustainability are planetary. My interest is both in the developing world – I am Indian – and in the developed world – I am a long time Londoner. My current research involves investigating what citizen led projects in urban communities in London and other UK cities are doing to reorient unsustainable systems  - energy, food and waste – towards sustainability so that all people everywhere can live and consume more sustainably. I have long been troubled by the conundrum of consumption: consumption is not intrinsically good or bad and some forms are even necessary for living a creative, educated, healthy and fulfilling life. But most forms of consumption currently run on oil. Furthermore, consumption patterns in western economies are still dependent on the unsustainable and unjust extraction of resources from poorer regions of the world. And so I felt the movement to live and consume more sustainably really needs to start in the affluent world. This provided me with the motivation for my research.

Virtuous Circles resonates with me because my research also focuses on small-scale grassroots projects. Although my research is not yet complete, I agree with the point made in Virtuous Circles that grassroots projects have an immense amount of knowledge that is invaluable to understanding how we can transition to a more sustainable world. Unfortunately, this knowledge is often ignored by policy makers, despite the lip service given to “communities”. This is true whether the community is in the developed or developing world. Another reason Virtuous Circles resonates me is the emphasis on integrated systems – when I started my research I didn’t want to be sectoral specific and choose either energy or food or waste systems, primarily because in nature these systems are not separated into sectors! All are integrated and IIED’s findings show that effective integration is key to sustainability.

On a final note, I was heartened to see German chemist Justus von Liebig’s attempt to persuade the London authorities to build a sewage recycling system for the city in the 1840s mentioned in the book. This missed opportunity is something I often think about – London would have been a pioneer sustainable megalopolis if a sewage system that used our sewage as nutrients for farms was implemented instead of the current approach of dumping the sewage into the river. Liebig’s solution would have integrated the system of food provision with the system of waste management. Liebig’s solution may have also avoided the need for artificial fertilisers (which is dependent on potash extraction and fossil fuels, and contributes to soil degradation and declining yields) to the scale it is used today and possibly would have also negated the need for supra infrastructures such as the proposed controversial 24 mile long London’s super sewer. This summer when The Regent’s Canal in East London was covered by toxic algae bloom, a by-product of high levels of nitrogen and phosphorous in our washing up liquids and detergents that find their way into the waste water stream, I thought again of Liebig and London’s missed opportunity. And so, Virtuous Circles reminds me that at the heart of sustainability is a very simple idea: zero waste

Download Virtuous Circles - http://pubs.iied.org/G03177.html

Durban is finished, now what?

In the early hours of Sunday morning the Durban Climate summit that had been running into overtime finished and the South African host were pleased to declare that we got a deal.

While the EU and the big players including USA, China and India were very happy with the deal and said it was a major step forward, the deal was quickly deemed an environmental defeat and unambitious. It is a deal that will leave us on path to runaway climate change say environmental groups including Greenpeace, WWF & Friends of the Earth.

So what does the deal include? Not a lot to be honest, it’s pretty simple, it’s a deal about a deal. The deal is to be concluded from now and until 2015 and no later than that, a legally binding deal will have to have be agreed that will then come into force by 2020. A green climate fund that was first promised in Copenhagen were also agreed, though the fund is empty and no one really knows where the money will come from and who will administrate it.

Just before the talks started a new stark warning were given to us by scientists that CO2 emissions must peak in the next five years if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change not exceeding the 2 degrees mark.

So based on the warning, by adding 2 and 2 together, everyone can see this deal doesn’t make sense. If we first have a legally binding deal by 2020, which is after the date that scientists have warned us emissions must peak what we must ask ourselves is it possible to have emissions on a global level peaking before then?

To be honest that’s one big question mark. Naturally and rightly NGO’s are critical about the deal. But a lot will depend on the deal, and at the moment I’m afraid to say it doesn’t look too positive. Here is what I think needs to happen before 2020:

1)     We keep thinking that CO2 emissions are from the burning of greenhouse gasses, but what we must not forget the emissions accountable from rapid deforestation. When we talk about deforestation, a common generalization is that we talk about The Amazon, but there are many places globally where deforestation is happening at an accelerating level, from the Indonesian rainforest to Borneo and Congo, and also Canada due to their Tar Sands destruction. If we could deal with these issues and drastically halt deforestation along with reforestation campaigns we would cut a lot of the emissions and at the same time help the biodiversity of these fragile regions.

2)     We need to protect the Arctic. The Antarctica and Arctic literally have the same function, but only the Antarctica is protected. A geopolitical war seems to be looming in the Arctic, as geologists believe there is vast amount of gas and oil reserves there. There is also a dispute about the borders of unclaimed land between all the Arctic nations ,which are: Denmark, Norway, Russia, Canada and USA.  Both Denmark and Russia want to lay claim on the North Pole with Russia controversially having planted a Russian flag on the seabed. The last 2 seasons Cairn Energy have controversially been drilling for oil off the coast of Greenland, without finding anything, but by doing so have poured a lot of chemicals into the sea, that will threaten the biodiversity in the region including Greenland’s biggest industry which is fishing. They have also been seen to manually melt icebergs as if it wasn’t happening quickly enough. On the basis of this Greenpeace have campaigned heavily against them.

3)     The Canadian Tar Sands is the dirties and most energy intensive energy project in the world and have been described by Nasa scientist and climatologist James Hansen as the biggest carbon bomb on the planet. The keystone pipeline that’s currently have been put on hold by Obama, needs to cancelled completely and Tar Sands to gradually be phased out. Although with Canada’s and US’s position climate change that is unlikely to happen.

4)     The largest emitters of CO2 China, India, USA, Russia etc. need to build their green energy revolution with rapid speed. If the EU tomorrow were to be carbon neutral if wouldn’t really matter much on a global scale if the big emitters were not tackling the problem.

5)     A lot will also depend how well renewable energy will develop in the next few years. Especially as some countries are drastically cutting the feed in tariff, that was meant to make homeowners invest in small scale renewables to power their homes. This has hit the solar industry quite hard, but will it recover? And will solar, wind and other renewable be competitive with fossil fuels? Will largely unproven technologies like tidal and wave finally take off?

6)     EU is playing a leading role and did so again at Durban. EU climate change secretary Connie Hedegaard literally brokered the deal and without her there wouldn’t have been a deal. She admits a lot of developments will need to happen before 2020 and she says the EU will continue to set tough ambitions for it’s member states. She says: ‘What EU does other countries follow’.

http://agreenerlifeagreenerworld.blogspot.com/

@Alorenzen

The spirit of the Olympics is a wonderful thing. The coming together of athletes from all over the world in peace is definitely something beautiful to celebrate. It’s a shame that a major sporting event such as the Olympics is often tainted by less then desirable sponsors - it seems inappropriate that fast food giants and fizzy drink producers should sponsor fitness and sports and even more inappropriate nuclear and oil companies are sustainability partners of London 2012, the games whose ambition is to be the “most sustainable games to date”.

Yet despite the hypocrisy of London 2012, having Dow Chemicals produce a warp for the Olympic Stadium is a kick in the teeth. Dow Chemicals own 100% of Union Carbide, the US company responsible for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy in 1984, arguably the world’s worst environmental disaster. Dow Chemicals deny liabilities because a paltry out of court settlement was paid in 1989 by Union Carbide. Dow also claims that because it didn’t own Union Carbide in 1984 it cannot be liable for the disaster (but Dow does benefit from Union Carbide assets). Neither Union Carbide nor Dow Chemicals have remediated the contaminated area and deformed children continue to be born. There is also a second disaster, separate to the gas explosion, to do with ground water contamination which would have happened anyway, even if the gas explosion hadn’t taken place. So the settlement doesn’t absolve Dow Chemicals of its responsibilities. To date, thousands have died and thousands more continue to suffer chronical illness.

On 2nd December 2011, to mark the disaster’s 27th anniversary and to continue the campaign to get LOCOG to drop Dow Chemicals as a sponsor for 2012, a press conference was held at the Olympic site. Ken Livingston rightly called Dow’s money blood money. We also heard from Lorraine, a nurse who spent 6 months volunteering in Bhopal and from Farah, a Bhopali survivor. Farah’s plea to LOCOG to drop Dow as a sponsor really moved me. Later, she told me she was 3 miles away from the site and that saved her life. 3 miles, the difference between life and death, between a life well lived and a life spent in anguish. 

LOCOG wake up. You don’t want London 2012’s legacy tarnished with Dow’s awful track record.

http://www.bhopal.org/what-happened/