`Author:` [[George Monbiot]] `Availability:` ## Summary ## Key Takeaways ## Quotes - ## Notes > [!info] > ## Highlights ### Introduction In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, [[Thomas Piketty]] argues that no government programme could be sustained without an 'apparatus of justification'.' Without the corporate press, without spin doctors and lobbyists and think tanks, the unnecessary programmes of austerity that several governments have imposed would be politically impossible. Ever since Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison financed the publication of Herbert Spencer's works in the late nineteenth century[^1], which argued, among other propositions, that millionaires stand at the top of a scala natura established by natural selection, with which we would be foolish to interfere, and that profound economic inequalities are both natural and necessary, global oligarchs have invested heavily in the infrastructure of persuasion. In reality, the free market is a political construction, that often has to be imposed through violence, such as Suharto's massacres in Indonesia, Pinochet's coup in Chile and the suppression of protests against structural adjustment and austerity all over the world.[^2] Far from being a neutral forum, the market is dominated by powerful agents - [[Corporations]] and oligarchs - who use their position to demand special treatment: contracts, handouts, tax breaks, treaties, the crushing of resistance and other political favours. They extend their power beyond their trading relationships through their ownership of the media and their funding and control of political parties. The negative freedom enjoyed by corporations and billionaires (freedom to be or to act without interference from others; as defined by Isaiah Berlin in his essay Two Concepts of Liberty[^3]) intrudes upon the negative freedom the rest of us enjoy. .. the vast infrastructure of law and coercion needed to commodify land, labour and money, none of which fall organically into a market economy.[^4] Without countervailing voices, wells will still be dug and bridges will still be built, but only for the few. Food will still be grown, but it will not reach the mouths of the poor.[^5] ### part 1. There Is Such a Thing as Society #### 1. Falling Apart Like the Stone Age, Iron Age and space age, the digital age says plenty about our artefacts, but little about society. The Anthropocene, in which humans exert a major impact on the biosphere, fails to distinguish this century from the previous twenty. What clear social change marks out our time from those that precede it? To me it's obvious. This is the Age of Loneliness. We are shaped, to a greater extent than almost any other species, by contact with others. In the past few years, we have seen loneliness become an epidemic among young adults.[^6] Now we learn that it is just as great an affliction for older people. A study by Independent Age shows that severe loneliness in England blights the lives of 700,000 men and 1.1 million women over fifty,[^7] and is rising with astonishing speed. Social isolation is as potent a cause of early death as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, while loneliness, research suggests, is twice as deadly as obesity.[^8] Dementia, high blood pressure, alcoholism and accidents - all these, like depression, paranoia, anxiety and suicide, become more prevalent when connections are cut.[^9] We cannot cope alone. We are less likely than other Europeans to have close friends or to know our neighbours. Who can be surprised, when everywhere we are urged to fight like stray dogs over a dustbin? We have changed our language to reflect this shift. Our most cutting insult is 'loser'. One of the tragic outcomes of loneliness is that people turn to their televisions for consolation: two-fifths of older people now report that the one-eyed god is their principal company.[^10] This self-medication enhances the disease. Research by economists at the University of Milan suggests that television helps to drive competitive aspiration.[^11] It strongly reinforces the income happiness paradox: the fact that, as national incomes rise, happiness does not rise with them. Aspiration, which increases with income, ensures that the point of arrival, of sustained satisfaction, retreats before us. The top 1 per cent now own 48 per cent of global wealth.[^12] Hobbes's pre-social condition was a myth. But we are now entering a post-social condition our ancestors would have believed impossible. Our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long. #### 2 Deviant and Proud I was prompted to write it by a remarkable book, by a Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe.[^13] [[What about Me?]]: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why. We are social animals, Verhaeghe argues, and our identity is shaped by the norms and values we absorb from other people. Every society defines and shapes its own normality - and its own abnormality - according to dominant narratives, and seeks either to make people comply or to exclude them if they don't. Where market fundamentalism has been most fiercely applied - in countries like the US and UK - social mobility has greatly declined.[^14] In the name of autonomy and freedom we have ended up controlled by a grinding, faceless bureaucracy. #### 3 Work-Force In June 2015, a note from an analyst at Barclays Global Power and Utilities in New York was leaked.[^15] It addressed students about to begin a summer internship, and offered a glimpse of the toxic culture into which they are inducted. #### 4 Addicted to Comfort How many would have foreseen a national conversation - in public and in private - that revolves around the three Rs: renovation, recipes and resorts? How many would have guessed that people possessed of unimaginable wealth and leisure and liberty would spend their time shopping for onion goggles and wheatgrass juicers? Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chain stores. #### 5 Dead Zone Introduced by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) have criminalised an apparently endless range of activities, subjecting thousands - mostly young and poor - to bespoke laws.[^16] They have been used to enforce a kind of caste prohibition: personalised rules, which prevent the untouchables from intruding into the lives of others. #### 6 Help Addicts, but Lock Up the Casual Users of Cocaine As Nick Davies argued during his investigation of drugs policy for the Guardian, major seizures raise the price of drugs. Demand among addicts is inelastic, so higher prices mean that they must find more money to buy them. The more drugs the police capture and destroy, the more robberies and muggings addicts will commit. Drugs policy in most nations is a matter of religion, not science. (Antonio Maria Costa’s) report does raise one good argument, however. At present the Class A drugs trade is concentrated in the rich nations. If it were legalised, we could cope. The use of drugs is likely to rise, but governments could use the extra taxes to help people tackle addiction. But because the wholesale price would collapse with legalisation, these drugs would for the first time become widely available in poorer nations, which are easier for companies to exploit (as tobacco and alcohol firms have found) and which are less able to regulate, raise taxes or pick up the pieces. The widespread use of cocaine or heroin in the poor world could cause serious social prob-lems: I've seen, for example, how a weaker drug - khat - seems to dominate life in Somali-speaking regions of Africa. "The universal ban on illicit drugs', the UN argues, 'provides a great deal of protection to developing countries.[^17] The drugs charity Transform has addressed this question, but only for the UK, where the results are clear-cut: prohibition is the worse option.[^18] As far as I can discover, no one has attempted a global study. Until that happens, Mr Costa's opinions on this issue are worth as much as mine or anyone else's: nothing at all. ### Part 2 - Lost Youth #### 7 Rewild the Child An overview of research into outdoor education by King's College London found that children who spend time learning in natural environments 'perform better in reading, mathematics, science and social studies.[^19] Exploring the natural world 'makes other school subjects rich and relevant and gets apathetic students excited about learning. Ofsted, the schools inspection service, reports that getting children out of the classroom raises 'standards, motivation, personal development and behaviour.’[^20] #### 8 The Child Inside As Jay Griffiths argues in her magnificent, heartrending book Kith, children fill the 'unoccupied territories', the spaces not controlled by tidy-minded adults, 'the commons of mud, moss, roots and grass.'[^21] Since the 1970s, the area in which children roam without adults has decreased by almost 90 per cent.? '[[Childhood]] is losing its commons.’[^22] Throughout the country, (children) become prisoners of bad design, and so do adults.[^23] What if people were entitled to buy an option for a plot on a new estate, which they would then help to plan? Not just the houses, but the entire estate would be built for and by those who would live there. The council or land corporation would specify the number and type of homes, then the future residents, including people on the social housing waiting list, would design the layout. Their children would help to create the public spaces. Communities would start to form even before people moved in, and the estates would doubtless look nothing like those built today. #### 9 Amputating Life Close to Its Base John Sheil and I sent questions to eight of the universities with the highest average graduate salaries: Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, the London Business School, Warwick, Sheffield and Edinburgh. We asked whether they seek to counter these lavish recruitment drives and defend students from the love blitz. With one remarkable exception, their responses ranged from feeble to dismal. Most offered no evidence of any prior interest in these questions. Where we expected deep deliberation to have taken place, we found instead an intellectual vacuum. They cited their duty of impartiality, which, they believe, prevents them from seeking to influence students' choices, and explained that there were plenty of other careers on offer. But they appear to have confused impartiality with passivity. Passivity in the face of unequal forces is anything but impartial. Impartiality demands an active attempt to create balance, to resist power, to tell the dark side of the celestial tale being pummelled into the minds of undergraduates by the richest City cults. We all know how they treat whistleblowers.[^24] #### 10 ‘Bug Splats’ Like Bush's government in Iraq, Barack Obama's administration neither documents nor acknowledges the civilian casualties of the CIA's drone strikes in north-west Pakistan. But a report by the law schools at Stanford and New York universities suggests that during the first three years of his time in office, the 259 strikes for which he is ultimately responsible killed between 297 and 569 civilians, of whom 64 were children.[^25] Children wounded in drone attacks told the researchers that they are too traumatised to go back to school and have abandoned hopes of the careers they might have had: their dreams as well as their bodies have been broken.[^26] #### 11 Kin Hell Dozens of socie-ties, across many centuries, have recognised same-sex marriage.[^27] Jesus insisted, 'If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters... he cannot be my disciple.’[^28] In his classic book [[A World of Their Own Making]], Professor John Gillis points out that until the Reformation the state of holiness was not matrimony but lifelong chastity.[^29] What the Reformation sanctified was the proto-industrial labour force, working and sleeping under one roof.[^30] The nuclear family, as idealised today, was an invention of the Victorians, but it bore little relation to the family life we are told to emulate. Its development was driven by economic rather than spiritual needs, as the Industrial Revolution made manufacturing in the household inviable. Much as the Victorians might have extolled their families, 'it was simply assumed that men would have their extramarital affairs and women would also find intimacy, even passion, outside marriage', and often with other women. Children's lives were characteristically wretched: farmed out to wet nurses, sometimes put to work in factories and mines, beaten, neglected, often abandoned as infants. In his book [[A History of Childhood]], Colin Heywood reports that, "The scale of abandonment in certain towns was simply stag-gering', reaching one-third or a half of all the children born in some European cities.[^31] #### 12 The Sacrificial Caste It seems to me that such abuses have three common characteristics. The first is that the countries in which they occur appear to possess a sacrificial caste of children, whose rights can be denied and whose interests can be disregarded with impu-nity. The second is that these countries have a powerful resistance towards confronting and addressing this injustice: discussing it often amounts to a taboo. (These two traits were chillingly dramatised in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel [[Never Let Me Go]].) The third is that systematic abuse becomes widely acknowledged only after determined people spend years trying to force it into the open in the face of official denial. #### 13 A Modest Proposal for Tackling Yourh Youth curfews, introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998,[^32] and dispersal orders, brought into effect by the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003,[^33] go some of the way towards tackling the problem, but they require the active involvement of the police, and apply only where and when they have been implemented. There is as yet no universal provision against those who insist, often in active collaboration with others, on being young people in public view. #### 14 Pro-Death Nations agency UNICEF notes that in the Netherlands, which has the world's lowest abortion rate, a sharp reduction in unwanted teenage pregnancies was caused by the combination of a relatively inclusive society with more open attitudes towards sex and sex education, including contraception.'[^34] In the US and UK, by contrast, which have the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, 'contraceptive advice and services may be formally available, but in a "closed" atmosphere of embarrassment and secrecy'. A report by the World Health Organisation shows that almost half the world's abortions are unauthorised and unsafe.[^35] The WHO estimates that between 65,000 and 70,000 women die as a result of illegal abortions every year, while 5 million suffer severe complications. These effects, the organisation says, 'are the visible consequences of restrictive legal codes.[^36] ### Part 3 The Wild Life #### 15 Everything Is Connected Large carnivores can transform both the populations and the behaviour of large herbivores. In turn this can change the nature and structure of the plant community, which in turn affects processes such as soil erosion, river movements and carbon storage. The availability of nutrients, the physical geography of the land, even the composition of the atmosphere: all now turn out to be affected by animals. Living systems exert far more powerful impacts on the planet and its processes than we suspected. I'm talking about [[Trophic Cascades]]: ecological processes that tumble from the top of an ecosystem to the bottom. (Trophic means relating to food and feeding.) It turns out that many living processes work from the top down, rather than the bottom up.[^37] One hypothesis which might help to explain the sudden disappearance from many parts of the world of the mega-fauna, following the first arrival of human beings, is that we triggered trophic cascades of destruction. One paper suggests that the first humans in Australia hunted some of the large animals to extinction, and that this caused the destruction of the rainforests, which in turn wiped out much of the remaining fauna.[^38] (Wales) often feed at depth, but they seldom defecate there, because when they dive the stress this exerts on the body requires the shutdown of some of its functions. So they perform their ablutions when they come up to breathe. What they are doing, in other words, is transporting nutrients from the depths, including waters too dark for photosynthesis to occur, into the photic zone, where plants can live. By producing their faecal plumes - in the surface waters, the whales fertilise the plant plankton on which the krill and fish depend.[^39] There are similar effects on land. Before serious conservation efforts began in the 1960s, wildebeest numbers in the Serengeti fell from about 1.2 million to 300,000. The result was similar to the hypothesised mechanism for the destruction of much of the Australian rainforest. As dry grass and other vegetation that the wildebeest would otherwise have eaten accumulated, wildfires ravaged around 80 per cent of the Serengeti every year.[^40] #### 16 Civilisation Is Boring 'One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds', the pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold wrote. 'An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.[^41] The world lives within us; we live within the world. By damaging the living planet we have diminished our existence. We have been able to do this partly as a result of our ability to [[Compartmentalise]]. This is another remarkable capacity we have developed, which perhaps reflects the demands of survival in the ever more complex human world we have created. By carving up the world in our minds we have learnt to shut ourselves out of it. One of the tasks that parents set themselves is to train their children in [[Linearity]]. Very young children don't do linearity. Their inner life is discursive, contingent, impulsive. They don't want to walk in a straight line down the pavement, but to wander off in the direction of whatever attracts their attention. They don't begin a task with a view to its conclusion. They throw themselves into it, engage for as long as it's exciting, then suddenly divert to something else. This is how all animals except adult (civilised) humans behave. Optimal foraging, the term biologists use to describe the way animals lock onto the best food supply, involves pursuing a task only for as long as it remains rewarding. Only with the development of farming did we have to discipline ourselves to think linearly. The language we use to describe them is also rigid and compartmentalised. In the UK we protect 'sites of special scientific interest' , as if the wildlife they contain is of interest only to scientists. The few parts of the seabed which are not ripped up by industrial trawling are described as reference areas, as if their only value is as a baseline with which to compare destruction elsewhere. And is there a more alienating term than 'reserve'? When we talk about reserve in people, we mean that they seem cold and remote. It reminds me of the old Native American joke: 'We used to like the white man, but now we have our reservations' Even 'the environment' is an austere and technical term, which creates no pictures in the mind. #### 17 End of an Era The efforts of governments are concentrated not on defending the living Earth from destruction, but on defending the machine that is destroying it. Whenever consumer capitalism becomes snarled up by its own contradictions, governments scramble to mend the machine, to ensure - though it consumes the conditions that sustain our lives - that it runs faster than ever before. Rewilding - the mass restoration of ecosystems - offers the best hope we have of creating refuges for the natural world, which is why I've decided to spend much of the next few years promoting it here and abroad. #### 18 The Population Myth A paper published in the journal Environment and Urbanization shows that the places where population has been growing fastest are those in which carbon dioxide has been growing most slowly, and vice versa. Between 1980 and 2005, for example, sub-Saharan Africa produced 18.5 per cent of the world's population growth and just 2.4 per cent of the growth in CO2. North America turned out 4 per cent of the extra people, but 14 per cent of the extra emissions. Sixty-three per cent of the world's population growth happened in places with very low emissions.[^42] James Lovelock, like Sir David Attenborough and Jonathan Porritt, is a patron of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). It is one of dozens of campaigns and charities whose sole purpose is to discourage people from breeding in the name of saving the biosphere. But I haven't been able to find any campaign whose sole purpose is to address the impacts of the very rich. As the habits of the super-rich show, there are no limits to human extravagance. Consumption can be expected to rise with economic growth until the biosphere hits the buffers. Anyone who understands this and still considers that population, not consumption, is the big issue is, in Lovelock's words, 'hiding from the truth'. It is the worst kind of paternalism, blaming the poor for the excesses of the rich. #### 19 The Dawning Whenever I stay in an unfamiliar part of the countryside, I try to wake before dawn and walk until the heat begins to rise. Many of my richest experiences with wildlife have occurred at such times. In this magical hour, I too seem to come to life. ### Part 4 - Feeding Frenzy #### 20 - Sheepwrecked Britain is being shagged by sheep, but hardly anyone dares say so. I blame Theocritus. His development in the third century BC of the pastoral tradition - the literary convention that associates shepherding with virtue and purity - helps to inspire our wilful blindness towards its destructive impacts. His theme was embraced by Virgil and the New Testament, in which Christ is portrayed both as the Good Shepherd and as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, 'which taketh away the sin of the world'. I've used Wales as my case study. Here, according to figures from 2010, the average subsidy for sheep farms on the hills is £53,000. Average net farm income is £33,000. The contribution the farmer makes to his income by keeping animals, in other words, is minus £20,000. Farmers argue that keeping sheep in the hills makes an essential contribution to Britain's food supply. But does it? Just over three-quarters of the area of Wales is devoted to livestock farming,[^43] largely to produce meat. But according to the UK's National Ecosystem Assessment, Wales imports by value seven times as much meat as it exports. This remarkable fact suggests a shocking failure of productivity. Spend two hours sitting in a bushy suburban garden and you are likely to see more birds and of a greater range of species than in walking five miles across almost any part of the British uplands. The land has been sheepwrecked. #### 21 - Ripping Apart the Fabric of the Nation I always flinch at the name given to soil in the US: dirt. Here there's a similar conflation: something dirty is said to have been soiled. Yet this great gift of nature is being squandered at a horrifying rate. One study suggests that soil in Devon is being lost at the rate of five tonnes per hectare per year. There are several reasons for this, mostly to do with bad practice, but the problem has been exacerbated by an increase in the cultivation of maize. Like the growing of potatoes, maize cultivation with conventional methods in this country is a perfect formula for ripping the soil off the land, as the ground is ploughed deeply, then left almost bare for several months. A study in south-west England suggests that the soil structure has broken down in 75 per cent of the maize fields there.[^44] A study in south-west England suggests that the soil structure has broken down in 75 per cent of the maize fields there.[^45] Maize cultivation has expanded from 1,400 hectares to 160,000 since 1970.2 It is not grown to feed people, but to feed livestock and to supply anaerobic digestion plants producing biogas. If the National Farmers' Union gets its way, maize growing will expand by another 100,000 hectares in the next six years, solely to make biogas. The draft directive asked the member states to take precau tions to minimise soil erosion and compaction, to maintain the organic matter soil contains, to prevent landslides and to prevent soil from being contaminated with toxic substances.[^47] Terrified yet? At the end of last month, unreported by any British newspaper or broadcaster, something unprecedented happened: a European legislative proposal was withdrawn. The Soil Framework Directive has been scrapped. The National Farmers' Union took credit for the decision: #### 22 - Drowning in Money One day a government consultant was walking over their fields during a rainstorm. He noticed something that fascinated him: the water flashing off the land suddenly disappeared when it reached the belts of trees the farmers had planted. This prompted a major research programme, which produced the following astonishing results: water sinks into the soil under the trees at sixty-seven times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under the grass.[^49] .. there is an unbreakable rule laid down by the Common Agricultural Policy. If you want to receive your single farm payment - by far the biggest component of farm subsidies that land has to be free from what it calls unwanted vegetation.'[^50] Land that is allowed to reforest naturally is not eligible. The subsidy rules have enforced the mass clearance of vegetation from the hills. One house was flooded thirty-one times in the winter of 2000-1 by muddy floods caused by ploughing.!? Another, in Suffolk, above which the fields had been churned up by pigs, was hit fifty times.[^51] But a paper on floods of this kind found that, There are no (or only very few) control measures taken yet in the UK.’[^52] Rivers, as I was told by the people who had just rewilded one in the Lake District - greatly reducing the likelihood that it would cause floods downstream - 'need something to chew on’. the drained and burnt moors of the Peak District National Park, comprehensively trashed by grouse shooting estates. A recent report by Animal Aid found that grouse estates in England, though they serve only the super-rich, receive some £37 million of public money every year in the form of subsidies.[^53] #### 23 Small Is Bountiful first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist [[Amartya Sen]], and has since been confirmed by dozens of further studies.[^54] There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are twenty times as productive as farms of over ten hectares.[^56] There's a good deal of controversy about why this relationship exists. Some researchers argued that it was the result of a statistical artefact: fertile soils support higher populations than barren lands, so farm size could be a result of productivity, rather than the other way around. But further studies have shown that the inverse relationship holds across an area of fertile land. Moreover, it works even in countries like Brazil, where the biggest farmers have grabbed the best land.[^57] The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers.[^58] Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower than on large farms (they don't have to spend money recruiting or supervising work-ers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more labour, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again immediately after the harvest; they might grow several different crops in the same field. If governments are serious about feeding the world, they should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting small farms. But the prejudice against small farmers is unshakeable. It gives rise to the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive. Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers' stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world. ### Part 5 - Energy Vampires #### 24 Leave It in the Ground In 2007, British planning authorities considered twelve new applications for opencast coal mines. They approved all but two of them. Later Hazel Blears, the Secretary of State in charge of planning, overruled Northumberland County Council in order to grant permission for an opencast mine at Shotton, on the grounds that the scheme (which will produce 9.3 million tonnes of CO2) is 'environmentally acceptable'.[^58] The British government also has a policy of maximising the UK's existing oil and gas reserves. To promote new production, it has granted companies a 90 per cent discount on the licence fees they pay for prospecting the continental shelf. It hopes the prospecting firms will open a new frontier in the seas to the west of the Shetland Isles? The government also has two schemes for 'forcing unworked blocks back into play'. If oil companies don't use their licences to the full, it revokes them and hands them to someone else. In other words it is prepared to be ruthlessly interventionist when promoting climate change, but not when preventing it: no minister talks of 'forcing' companies to reduce their emissions. Ministers hope the industry will extract up to 28 billion barrels of oil and gas. The International Energy Agency's new outlook report warns that 'urgent action is needed' to cut carbon emissions. The action it recommends is investing $22 trillion in new energy infrastructure, most of which will be spent on extracting, transporting and burning fossil fuels.[^59] In December 2007, BP announced a massive investment in Canadian tar sands. Oil produced from tar sands creates even more carbon emissions than the extraction of petroleum. There's enough tar and kerogen in North America to cook the planet several times over. If that runs out, they switch to coal, of which there is hundreds of years' supply. When you review the plans for fossil fuel extraction, the horrible truth dawns that every carbon-cutting programme on earth is a con. Without supply-side policies, runaway climate change is inevitable, however hard we try to cut demand. #### 25 Applauding Themselves to Death Imagine trying to bring slavery to an end not by stopping the transatlantic trade, but by seeking only to discourage people from buying slaves once they had arrived in the Americas. If you want to discourage a harmful trade, you must address it at both ends: production and consumption. Of the two, production is the most important. Even if efforts to restrict consumption temporarily succeed, they are likely to be self-defeating. A reduction in demand when supply is unconstrained lowers the price, favouring carbon-intensive industry. Creating a silence requires only an instinct for avoiding conflict. It is a conditioned and unconscious reflex, part of the package of social skills that secures our survival. Don't name the Devil for fear that you'll summon him. Breaking such silences requires a conscious and painful effort. You cannot solve a problem without naming it. The absence of official recognition of the role of fossil fuel production in causing climate change - blitheringly obvious as it is - permits governments to pursue directly contradictory policies. In the Infrastructure Act that received royal assent in February 2015, maximising the economic recovery of petroleum from the UK's continental shelf became a statutory duty.[^60] Future governments are now legally bound to squeeze every possible drop out of the ground. Barack Obama has the same problem. During a television interview, he confessed that, 'We're not going to be able to burn it all.' So why, he was asked, has his government been encouraging ever more exploration and extraction of fossil fuels? His administration has opened up marine oil exploration from Florida to Delaware - in waters that were formally off-limits.[^61] It has increased the number of leases sold for drilling on federal lands and, most incongruously, rushed through the process to enable Shell to prospect in the highly vulnerable Arctic waters of the Chukchi Sea.[^62] contradictions beset most governments with environmental pretentions. Norway, for example, intends to be 'carbon-neutral' by 2030. Perhaps it hopes to export its entire oil and gas output, while relying on wind farms at home.[^63] I believe there are ways of resolving this problem, ways that might recruit other powerful interests against these corporations. For example, a global auction in pollution permits would mean that governments had to regulate just a few thousand oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser factories, rather than the activities of 7 billion people.[^64] #### 26 The Grime behind the Crime It seemed, at first, preposterous. The hypothesis was so exotic that I laughed. The rise and fall of violent crime during the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first were caused, it proposed, not by changes in policing or imprisonment, single-parenthood, recession, crack cocaine or the legalisation of abortion, but mainly by... lead. I don't mean bullets. The crime waves that afflicted many parts of the world and then, against all predictions, collapsed, were ascribed, in an article published by Mother Jones in January 2013, to the rise and fall in the use of lead-based paint and leaded petrol.[^65] Lead poisoning in infancy, even at very low levels, impairs the development of those parts of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex) that regulate behaviour and mood. The effect is stronger in boys than in girls. Lead poisoning is associated with attention deficit disorder, impulsiveness, aggression and, according to one paper, psychopathy.' Lead is so toxic that it is unsafe at any level. There is only one remaining manufacturer of tetraethyl lead on earth. It's based in Ellesmere Port in Britain, and it's called Innospec. The product has long been banned from general sale in the UK, but the company admits on its website that it's still selling this poison to other countries. Innospec refuses to talk to me, but other reports claim that tetraethyl lead is being exported to Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, Iraq, North Korea, Sierra Leone and Yemen, countries afflicted either by chaos or by governments who don't give a damn about their people. #### 27 Going Critical If other forms of energy production caused no damage, these impacts would weigh more heavily. But energy is like medicine: if there are no side-effects, the chances are that it doesn't work. Like others, I have called for renewable power to be used both to replace the electricity produced by fossil fuel and to expand the total supply, displacing the oil used for transport and the gas used for heating fuel. Are we also to demand that it replace current nuclear capacity? The more work we expect renewables to do, the greater the impacts on the landscape will be, and the tougher the task of public persuasion. At high latitudes like ours, most small-scale ambient power production is a dead loss. Generating solar power in the UK involves a spectacular waste of scarce resources.[^66] It's hopelessly inefficient and poorly matched to the pattern of demand. Wind power in populated areas is largely worth-less. This is partly because we have built our settlements in sheltered places. And how do we drive our textile mills, brick kilns, blast furnaces and electric railways - not to mention advanced industrial processes? Rooftop solar panels? The moment you consider the demands of the whole economy is the moment at which you fall out of love with local energy production. A national (or, better still, international) grid is the essential prerequisite for a largely renewable energy supply. Some Greens go even further: why waste renewable resources by turning them into electricity? Why not use them to provide energy directly? To answer this question, look at what happened in Britain before the Industrial Revolution. The damming and weiring of British rivers for watermills was small-scale, renewable, picturesque and devastating. By blocking the rivers and silting up the spawning beds, they helped bring to an end the gigantic runs of migratory fish that were once among our great natural spectacles and which fed much of Britain: wiping out sturgeon, lampreys and shad as well as most sea trout and salmon.[^67] As E. A. Wrigley points out in his new book [[Energy and the English Industrial Revolution]], the 11 million tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11 million acres of woodland (one-third of the land surface) would have generated.[^68] Deep green energy production - decentralised, based on the products of the land - is far more damaging to humanity than nuclear meltdown. #### 28 Power Crazed Since the tsunami in 2011, the Internet has been awash with ever more lurid claims about Fukushima. Millions have read reports which state that children on the western seaboard of the US are dying as a result of radiation released by the damaged plant. It doesn't seem to matter how often and effectively these claims are debunked: they keep on coming? But children in the US really are dying as a result of pollution from coal plants, and we hear almost nothing about it. among the most polluting power stations in Europe, Longannet in Scotland is ranked eleventh. Drax, in England, is ranked seventh.! The House of Lords has just failed to pass an amendment which would have forced a gradual shutdown of our coal-burning power plants: they remain exempted from the emissions standards other power stations have to meet. Pg. 172 Paragraph 2 Pg. 100 Paragraph 4 `Concepts:` `Knowledge Base:` [^1]: Susan Jacoby, 2008, The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy, Old Street Publishing, London. [^2]: David Harvey, 2005, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford; Naomi Klein, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Penguin Books, London. [^3]: Isaiah Berlin, 1958, Two Concepts of Liberty, published in Isaiah Berlin, 1969, Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford University Press, Oxford. [^4]: Fred Block and Margaret Somers, 2014, The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. [^5]: Amartya Sen, 1981, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entilement and Deprivation, Oxford University Press, Oxford. [^6]: Natalie Gil, 20 July 2014, 'Loneliness: A Silent Plague That Is Hurting Young People Most', theguardian.com. [^7]: International Longevity Centre and Independent Age, 2013, Isolation: A Growing Issue Among Older Men, independentage.org. [^8]: Ibid; Gil, 'Loneliness'. [^9]: Ian Sample, 16 February 2014, Loneliness Twice as Unhealthy as Obesity for Older People, Study Finds', theguardian.com; Gill, 'Loneliness'. [^10]: The Campaign to End Loneliness, 'Loneliness Research', campaign-toendloneliness.org. [^11]: Luca Stanca and Luigino Bruni, June 2005, 'Income Aspirations, Television and Happiness: Evidence from the World Values Surveys', boa.unimib.it. [^12]: Jill Treanor, 14 October 2014, 'Richest 1% of People Own Nearly Half of Global Wealth, Says Report, theguardian.com. [^13]: Paul Verhaeghe, 2014, [[What about Me?]] The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society, Scribe: Melbourne and London. [^14]: Simon Rogers, 22 May 2012, 'Social Mobility: The Charts That Shame Britain', theguardian.com. [^15]: Daniel Huang, 3 June 2015, ‘[[The Ten Commandments for Wall Street Interns]]’, wsj.com. [^16]: Alex Gask, 2004, Anti-Social Behaviour Orders and Human Rights, Liberty, liberty-human-rights.org.uk. [^17]: Costa, World Drug Report 2009. [^18]: Transform Drug Policy Foundation, April 2009, 'A Comparison of the Cost-Effectiveness of the Prohibition and Regulation of Drugs', tdpf.org. uk. [^19]: Kings College London, April 2011, Understanding the Diverse Benefits of Learning in Natural Environments, webarchive,nationalarchives.gov.uk. [^20]: Offsted, November 2012, Learning Outside the Classroom: How Far Should You Go?, Ofsted, Manchester, nationalarchives.gov.uk. [^21]: Jay Griffiths, 2013, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, Penguin Books, London. [^22]: Stephen Moss, 2012, Natural Childhood, nationaltrust.org.uk. [^23]: Please see the 1997 report Child's Play: Facilitating Play on Housing Estates by the Chartered Institute of Housing and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation for an excellent summary of what child-centred design might involve, at jrf.org.uk. [^24]: Dina Medland, 5 June 2013, 'Whistleblowing Almost Killed Me', ft.com. [^25]: International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic, Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic, NYU School of Law, September 2012, Living under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan, livingunderdrones.org. [^26]: International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, '[[Living under Drones]]' [^27]: William N. Eskridge, 1993, 'A History of Same-Sex Marriage', Virginia Law Review, vol. 79, no. 7; Jim Duffy, I1 August 1998, 'When Marriage between Gays Was a Rite, libchrist.com; 'Same-Sex Unions throughout Time: A History of Gay Marriage', randomhistory.com. [^28]: Luke 14:26. [^29]: John R. Gillis, 1996, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values, Basic Books, New York. [^30]: Gillis, A World of Their Own Making. [^31]: Colin Heywood, 2001, A History of Childhood, Polity, Cambridge. [^32]: Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Section 14, legislation.gov.uk [^33]: Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, Section 30, legislation.gov.uk. [^34]: UNICEF, July 2001, A League Table of Teenage Births in Rich Nations', UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence. unicef-irc.org. [^35]: World Health Organisation, 2007, Unsafe Abortion: Global and Regional Estimates of the Incidence of Unsafe Abortion and Associated Mortality in 2003, fifth edition, who.int. [^36]: WHO, Unsafe Abortion. [^37]: Does this mean trickle down [[Economics#Trophic cascade and trickle down economics|economics]] is correct!?.. No.. [^38]: S. Rule et al., 23 March 2012, "The Aftermath of Megafaunal Extinction: Ecosystem Transformation in Pleistocene Australia', ncbi.nlm.hih.gov. [^39]: Joe Roman et al., September 2014, 'Whales as Marine Rcosystem Engineers', Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, vol. 12, no. 7. [^40]: Oswarlk J. Schmitz, 19 September 2013, "Animating the Carbon Cycle', Ecosystems, vol. 17, no. 2. [^41]: Aldo Leopold, 1949, A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 197. [^42]: David Satterthwaite, September 2009, 'The Implications of Population Growth and Urbanization for Climate Change, Environment and Urbanization, vol. 21, no. 2, eausagepub.com. [^43]: The National Ecosystem Assessment states that 'agricultural land occupied some 1.64 million ha or 79 per cent of Wales in 2008' and that 'crops now account for only 3 per cent of the agricultural land area'. UK National Ecosystem Assessment, Chapter 20, uknea.unep-wcmc.org. [^44]: R. C. Palmer and R. P. Smith, December 2013, 'Soil Structural Degradation in SW England and Its Impact on Surface-Water Runoff Generation', Soil Use and Management, vol. 29, no. 4. [^45]: R. C. Palmer and R. P. Smith, December 2013, 'Soil Structural Degradation in SW England and Its Impact on Surface-Water Runoff Generation', Soil Use and Management, vol. 29, no. 4. [^46]: Commission of the European Communities, 22 September 2006, Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council Establishing a Framework for the Protection of Soil, eur-lex.europa.eu. [^49]: B. Reynolds et al., February 2014, The Impact of Rural Land Management Changes on Soil Hydraulic Properties and Runoff Processes: Results from Experimental Plots in Upland UK', Hydrological Processes 28, no. 4, doi: 10.1002/hyp.9826. [^50]: Official Journal of the European Union, 31 January 2009. Council Regulation (EC), no. 73/2009 of 19 January 2009, establishing common rules for direct support schemes for farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy and establishing certain support schemes for farmers, amending Regulations (EC) no. 1290/2005, (EC) no. 247/2006, (EC) no 378/2007 and repealing Regulation (EC) no. 1782/2003, Annex III, eur-lex.europa. eu. This rule remains unchanged in the current round. [^51]: R. Evans, April 2010, 'Runoff and Soil Erosion in Arable Britain: Changes in Perception and Policy since 1945', Environmental Science and Policy, vol. 13, no. 2, sciencedirect.com. [^52]: Boardman and Vandale, 'Soil Erosion'. [^53]: Animal Aid, 2013, 'Calling the Shots: The Power and Privilege of the Grouse-Shooting Elite', animalaid.org.uk. [^54]: Amartya Sen, February 1962, 'An Aspect of Indian Agriculture', Economic Weekly, vol. 14, epw.in. [^55]: Fatma Gül Ünal, October 2006, 'Small Is Beautiful: Evidence of Inverse Size Yield Relationship in Rural Turkey', Policy Innovations, policyinnova-tions.org• [^56]: Giovanni Cornia, 1985, 'Farm Size, Land Yields and the Agricultural Production function: An Analysis for Fifteen Developing Countries, World Development, vol. 13, researchgate.net. [^57]: For example, Peter B. R. Hazell, January 2005, 'Is There a Future for Small Farms?", Agricultural Economics, vol. 32. [^58]: Banks Developments, 29 November 2007, 'Banks Group's Shotton Surface Mine Proposals Approved', banksdevelopments.com. [^59]: International Energy Agency, 2007, World Energy Outlook, 2007, table 1.9, p. 25. worldenergyoutlook.org. [^60]: The Stationery Office, 2015, 'Maximising Economic Recovery of UK Petroleum', Infrastructure Act 2015, legislation.gov.uk. [^61]: Thomas L. Friedman, 7 June 2014, 'Obama on Obama on Climate’, nytimes.com. [^62]: Subhanker Banerjee, 3 March 2015, "Tomgram: Subhankar Banerjee, Arctic Nightmares, tomdispatch.com. [^63]: Michael Le Page, 30 September 2013, IPC Digested: Just Leave the Fossil Fuels Underground", newscientist.com. [^64]: See kyoto2.org. [^65]: Kevin Drum, January/ February 2013, 'America's Real Criminal Element: Lead', motherjones.com. [^66]: George Monbiot, 1 March 2010, 'Are We Really Going to Let Ourselves Be Duped into This Solar Panel Rip-off?", theguardian.com; George Monbiot, 11 March 2010, 'Solar PV Has Failed in Germany and It Will Fail in the UK', theguardian.com. [^67]: Callum Roberts, 2007, The Unnatural History of the Sea: The Past and Future of Humanity and Fishing (Gaia Thinking), Gaia Books, London. [^68]: E. A. Wrigley, 2010, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 37 and 39.