by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 26, 2019 | Gender
by Morning Star
COMMUNISTS called for protection of women’s spaces and preservation of “separate spaces and distinct services to protect women from violence and abuse” today.
The party’s biennial congress said that women’s rights won over decades of struggle were “under sustained ideological attack,” thanks to the “growth and ascendancy of neoliberal philosophy across a range of intellectual fields.”
It adopted a resolution expressing concern at “the divisive debate around self-identification which conflates ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ which could threaten the rights of women and girls” and committed members to fight for a wider understanding of these problems in the labour movement.
Delegates discussed the attacks on women who raised concerns about self-identification and attempts to no-platform or silence them, including attacks on the Morning Star for agreeing to publish articles on the subject.
Mover Mary Davis of the London district said that socialism would be unattainable without “an understanding of the link between women’s oppression and class exploitation.”
by DGR News Service | Jan 5, 2019 | Movement Building & Support
Coming to a political consciousness is not a painless task. To overcome denial means facing the everyday, normative cruelty of a whole society, a society made up of millions of people who are participating in that cruelty, and if not directly, then as bystanders with benefits. A friend of mine who grew up in extreme poverty recalled becoming politicized during her first year in college, a year of anguish over the simple fact that “there were rich people and there were poor people, and there was a relationship between the two.” You may have to face full-on the painful experiences you denied in order to survive, and even the humiliation of your own collusion. But knowledge of oppression starts from the bedrock that subordination is wrong and resistance is possible. The acquired skill of analysis can be psychologically and even spiritually freeing.
– Lierre Keith
by Stroke
Strictly speaking, all of my problems, the whole drama of my life and suffering, can be summarized in one word: poverty.
From birth, it seems to have been my destiny, the element that determines my life the most. I really don’t want to see myself as a victim. But I can no longer accept the widespread opinion (one could also call it dominant ideology) that everyone is responsible for his or her own destiny; that everyone can make it, if he or she only strives and works hard enough. Because this is simply wrong.
I have tried seriously for many years to gain a foothold in the world of work. I am smart, educated, have a well-groomed appearance, and two academic degrees. But it’s not my fault.
My “mistake” was merely to enter the “labour market” shortly after the introduction of Gerhard Schroeder’s Agenda 2010 and the associated Hartz “reforms”.
What the poor need to understand, is that poverty is a political goal, because poverty is a fundamental pillar of capitalism.
Money, at least in theory, is nothing more than a means of exchange. But as it is used in reality, it is an ideological instrument of power with a quasi-religious character which is used with increasing brutality.
As Max Wilbert writes in a recent interview, “The world today is being run by people who believe in money as a god. They’re insane, but they have vast power, and they’re using that power in the real world. That’s the physical manifestation of their violent, corrupt ideology.”
In his book Endgame, the writer Derrick Jensen radically deconstructs the “religion” of money. He writes: “There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.”
Money is power. Poverty is an immaterial prison. And the Hartz-laws, with the contemptuous ideology and systematic agitation (classism) behind them, are an immaterial concentration camp.
Welcome to fascism 2.0, the smart fascism of the 21st century.
First of all: I am aware that the comparison with the concentration camps is sensitive. In no way do I want to trivialize the horror of the physical Nazi concentration camps. Under no circumstances should this comparison be understood as a disregard for the suffering of the victims and their descendants.
I am talking about an immaterial concentration camp to make it clear that this time it is mainly ideological walls in which the inmates are held prisoner.
This ideology, however, has some functional parallels with the real concentration camps. And these practices have been incorporated into a legal framework in German legislation, namely the SGB II, colloquially called Hartz Laws.
Expropriation: Whoever ends up in the immaterial concentration camp HartzIV is systematically expropriated. He/she is forced to sell any “usable property”, including saved retirement provisions. Without Newspeech one could also simply say: They are robbed.
Disenfranchisement: Rights enshrined in the German Basic Law, such as the right to freedom of movement and free choice of occupation, no longer apply. “HartzIV is an open prison system,” says entrepreneur Götz Werner. In fact, HartzIV recipients are subject to the so-called “Accessibility Order”, i.e. they must be reachable at any time by letter post in order to be able to come to the authority the next day and immediately be available for a job offer.
Forced labour: HartzIV recipients must accept any “reasonable work” under threat of sanctions. The journalist Susan Bonath writes about this: “The unemployed, for example, were assigned to do clean-up work or collect garbage in cities, they had to maintain green spaces and monuments or to read aloud in nursing homes. All models had and have one thing in common: those affected work at extremely low wages, from which they alone cannot live. Compulsory work models for outsourced workers are not inventions of modern capitalists. Let us recall the workhouses whose history stretches from the early modern period to the industrial age. The German fascists established the Reich Labour Service. The aim of those in power behind it is clear: they wanted to make the unemployment that was increasingly produced in times of crisis invisible and – more or less brutally – to prevent those affected through employment from thinking about their situation.”
There have been cases where women have been advised by the authorities to prostitute themselves, because – thanks also to Gerhard Schröder – this is now nothing more than a legal job in the service sector.
Demoralization: Recipients are regularly summoned to appointments under threat of sanctions and interrogated like criminals, furthermore demoralized with the apportionment of blame and shame to be “difficult to mediate”. The institutions are operating a perfidious psycho-terror in order to scare their victims (called “customers” in neoliberal Newspeech) and systematically demoralize them. With the words of anti-HartzIV activist Manfred Bartl: “At no point is it really about ‘the human being’, but about either breaking him or her and/or making him or her identify with his ongoing oppression. But where this succeeds, nobody resists against this regime any more, because then everyone believes it: I am obviously to blame myself, I have experienced it often enough in the meantime…hence the problem of mass unemployment are not the unemployed, who only had to be “improved”, as the Hartz IV regime repeatedly circulates, but it’s the increasingly inhuman “labour market” on the one hand and the Social Code II, which literally keeps them out, on the other!
Exclusion, stigmatization and the creation of a new class of people: Indeed, the entire design of the HartzIV ideological concentration camp aims to create a new class of people in Germany who did not previously exist in this way. And it aims to keep the new lower class powerless and dependent. Resistance is suffocated from the outset by a perfidious, sophisticated mixture of ideology, class division through systematic propaganda in the corporate media, the greatest possible economic dependence and the permanent fear of those affected through the threat of sanctions.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han, who studies the neoliberal psycho politics, comments: “It’s madness how scared the Hartz people live here. They are held in this bannoptikum, (a panopticon is a type of institutional building and a system of control designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. It is a design where a guard can watch all the prisoners from the middle. The term panopticon is nowadays used as a synonym for the global mass surveillance. A bannopticon in this sense is a prison in which the inmates are banned, becoming invisible for the public) so that they do not break out of their fear-cell. I know many Hartzer, they are treated like garbage. In one of the richest countries in the world, Germany, people are treated like scum. Dignity is taken away from them. Of course, these people do not protest because they are ashamed. They blame themselves instead of blaming or accusing society. No political action can be expected from this class.”
With the new class, the institutions created by the Hartz laws administer an army of workers who are supplied at the lowest level and who must be available, mobile, and flexible as possible at all times for any form of work. As such they exert enormous pressure on those who still have regular jobs. The Agenda 2010 was therefore also an effective instrument for wage dumping and the creation of a new, gigantic low-wage sector, for which Gerhard Schröder received great praise from his colleagues from France and other European countries.
The declared aim of the institutions (Newspeech Jobcenter) is to provide the unemployed with jobs that secure their livelihood, i.e. to get them out of unemployment (and thus out of unemployment statistics) as quickly as possible. However, this goal is nothing more that another of the usual neoliberal lies. In reality, very few people manage to escape from dependence. The authorities thus also administer a large part of the working poor, who work, but whose wages are below the HartzIV level. They fall out of the official statistics, but remain dependent and under the full control of the authorities with all the measures mentioned above.
The propaganda often proves to be a self-fulfilling prophecy for the new class in a familiar way: derided as lazy alcoholics, many actually end up as apathetic alcoholics in order to endure their hopeless existence.
This is indeed a contemptuous treatment of a class of people who are no longer worth anything in our culture. They are superfluous, rubbish, rejects, waste. We‘ve seen this before.
It’s therefore not surprising that HartzIV recipients have a significantly increased stress level. Physicians know that chronic stress is one of the most common causes of life-threatening cardiovascular disease and strokes. Those who die of stress and anxiety or end up in the medical-industrial complex are excluded from unemployment statistics. This is how concentration camps work today.
But in smart fascism 2.0, violence is ideologically much better packaged and gets along without its direct physical forms, because direct, physical violence always generates resistance, which the system must suppress or avoid.
The modern ruling class no longer needs to get their hands dirty. Instead, they use what Rainer Mausfeld calls “Soft Power”:
“The most important goal is to neutralize the will of the population to change society, or to divert attention to politically irrelevant goals. In order to achieve this in the most robust and consistent way possible, manipulation techniques aim at much more than just political opinions. They aim at a targeted shaping of all aspects that affect our political, social and cultural life, as well as our individual ways of life. To a certain extent, they aim to create a ‘new human being’ whose social life merges into the role of the politically apathetic consumer. In this sense they are totalitarian, so that the great democracy-theorist Sheldon Wolin rightly speaks of an ‘inverted totalitarianism’, a new form of totalitarianism that is not perceived by the population as totalitarianism.”
One cannot understand our society, or rather what is left of it, without realizing that it consists of social groups or classes. Capitalist/neoliberal ideology says that there are no classes or groups, not even society.
“Who is society? There is no such thing!” said the Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher. Within neoliberal ideology, there are only individuals who (must) assert their own interests on the market. Meanwhile, the ideology, as promoted by Thatcher, has indeed managed to completely atomize what was left of society and to transform it into an aggregate of totally isolated and alienated individuals who compete with each other on the labor market and passionately exploit themselves, while those below languish inside the immaterial prison poverty, or the Hartz-concentration camp.
The ideology is deeply hammered into our heads. We have been taught to feel so much shame about our failure that we do not resist. Instead, we submit to these modern forms of slavery and forced labor. The systematic hatred between classes makes it so that the intellectuals and the middle class, who would have the moral duty to show solidarity with the lower classes and to reject such systematic oppression, are, unfortunately, mostly followers and accept the modern concentration camps, just as the good Germans already did in the past. They could have (must have!) got up, back then as well as now, and said: We are not going with that!
Many people (at least in Germany) still tend to regard the legal system and executive authorities as something positive, as institutions created to serve and help the population. In the meantime, neoliberal Newspeak prevails here as well. Laws and authorities are increasingly created and used as instruments of exploitation and oppression.
“Law organizes power”, as lawyer Catherine McKinnon puts it.
The social reality of the lower classes, of those imprisoned in poverty or HartzIV cannot (and shall not) be understood by the upper classes, the well-earning doctors, lawyers, judges and so on, and the middle class, which, indoctrinated by the neoliberal ideology, passionately exploits itself. Therefore, these classes are easily accessible to the agitation and classism practiced by those in power. Just as there was little resistance in the population against the concentration camps at that time, there is little resistance today against the mass impoverishment, oppression and systematic exploitation of large sections of the population with the Hartz laws.
As Susan Bonath writes, “the Macron government in France is also planning massive social cuts. And it wants to spy on the unemployed in a similar way to Germany. Therefore, the Paris Ministry of Labour recently announced, the administrative staff would be increased. Instead of 200, 1,000 inspectors will in future be released onto the unemployed. The goal of the agenda of those in power here and there is clear: employees will be muzzled. They should stay still for fear of relegation. The servitude of the 21st century sends its greetings.”
Before the Macron government could push its “reforms” as far as the Schröder government did in Germany, masses of poor people are already taking to the streets in France and other countries. The yellow warning vests they wear are a powerful symbol of a united resistance of the poor and economically detached.
If you currently walk around Heidelberg, where I live, a rich and rather elitist university town, with a yellow vest, people look at you like a criminal. “Working class”, their looks say, “underclass”, “dirt”.
Before putting on the vest I had unfortunately forgotten that (even symbolic) resistance, which is merely a struggle for our basic rights and livelihoods, is prohibited in the highly conformist German society, which is effectively policing itself by social norms. “Inverted totalitarianism” indeed.
The usual self-righteous, dismissive commentaries of the bourgeoisie on the violence of the insurgents are blind to the inherent forms of systematic economic and structural violence deeply rooted in our social system, against which the poor and economically detached with the yellow vests resist. They do not want to see that our society “is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.”
I just heard from an activist who got a visit from the Criminal Investigation Department because she had a yellow vest hanging from her balcony. She was told by the police that it is “not okay for someone to show one’s political opinion like that”.
Welcome to Fascism 2.0.
It is time for a global uprising of the poor. Our common goal must be to deprive the rich of their ability to steal from the poor and the powerful of their ability to destroy the planet.
Stand up.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 28, 2018 | Agriculture
by Richard Young – SFT Policy Director / Sustainable Food Trust
Media attention has again highlighted the carbon footprint of eating meat, especially beef, with some journalists concluding that extensive grass-based beef has the highest carbon footprint of all. SFT policy director, Richard Young has been investigating and finds that while the carbon footprint of a year’s consumption of beef and lamb in the UK is high, it is nevertheless responsible for less emissions than SFT chief executive Patrick Holden’s economy class flight to the EAT forum in Stockholm this week.
A recent, very comprehensive, research paper by Poore and Nemecek from Oxford University and Agroscope, a large research company in Switzerland, has again drawn attention to the rising demand for meat, resulting from population growth and increasing affluence in some developing countries. Looked at from a global perspective the figures appear stark. The study claims that livestock production accounts for 83% of global farmland and produces 56-58% of the greenhouse gas emissions from food, but only contributes 37% of our protein intake and 18% of calories. As such, it’s perhaps not so surprising that concerned journalists come up with coverage like the Guardian’s, Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth. This is part of a series of articles, some of which have been balanced, but most of which have largely promoted vegan and vegetarian agendas with little broader consideration of the issues.
The question of what we should eat to reduce our devastating impact on the environment, while also reducing the incidence of the diet-related diseases which threaten to overwhelm the NHS and other healthcare systems, is one of the most important we face. Yet, the debate so far has been extremely limited and largely dominated by those with little if any practical experience of food production or what actually constitutes food system sustainability.
I’ve lost count of the number of food campaigners who’ve told me that all we need to do to make food production sustainable is to stop eating meat. Really? What about the environmental impact of palm oil, soya bean oil, rape oil and even sunflower oil production; the over-enrichment of the environment from nitrogen fertiliser; the decline in pollinating insects; the use of pesticides with known harmful impacts that would have been banned years ago were it not for the fact that intensive crop and vegetable growers can’t produce food without them?
What also about the growing problem of soil degradation, not just in the countries from which we import food, but right here in the UK? Environment Secretary Michael Gove himself has warned that we are 30-40 years away from running out of soil fertility on large parts of our arable land. With only minor exceptions, soil degradation is not a problem on UK grasslands.
Contrary to popular belief, continuous crop production is not sustainable. That’s the mistake made by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago in what is now Iraq, and the Romans in North Africa 2,000 years ago, and in both cases the soils have never recovered. Far from abandoning livestock farming on UK grassland, we actually need to reintroduce grass and grazing animals into arable crop rotations. Despite the drop in demand for red meat in the UK (beef consumption down 4% and lamb consumption down more than 30% since 2000), at least one leading conventional farmer has now publicly recognised the agronomic need for grazed grass breaks. Even before there has been any encouragement in policy, I am aware that some arable farmers are already being forced to re-introduce grass and livestock because they can no longer control arable weeds like blackgrass, sterile brome and couch (twitch), which have become resistant to the in-crop herbicides repeatedly applied to them in all-arable rotations.
Grazing livestock and nature conservation
Seemingly oblivious of these issues, George Monbiot in The best way to save the planet? Drop meat and dairy, on Friday, June 8, also used the research study as evidence to support his claim that if we all gave up meat and dairy we’d be able to re-wild grasslands and live happily by eating more imported soya. Giving up livestock farming would, he believes, allow “many rich ecosystems destroyed by livestock farming to recover, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, protecting watersheds and halting the sixth great extinction in its tracks.”
He quoted a passage from the Poore and Nemecek research paper which states that the environmental impacts of converting grass into human-edible protein are “immense under any production method practiced today”. However, ‘immense’ is a subjective adjective. There are many things we do which have far higher negative impacts, most of which are non-essential and do not bring with them the unique benefits that come from grazing animals. Letters responding to the Guardian’s series of articles drew attention to some of these, including issues previously publicised by the Guardian itself.
What about meat and wildlife?
It’s true, and a very great concern, that human activity is destroying the natural world in a completely unsustainable way. The growing of grain crops specifically for intensive livestock is clearly part of the problem, as is highly intensive grassland farming. However, blaming meat consumption so specifically lets an awful lot of practices off the hook. When one considers the rabbits, hares, deer, moles and wild birds killed each year to protect food crops, and the decline in hedgehog and other small mammal numbers since the 1950s – in part due to the removal of hedgerows to make fields larger for crop production – plant-based diets could even be responsible for the deaths of as many mammals and birds as animals slaughtered from the livestock sector.
Since we were (mistakenly in my view) encouraged to switch from animal to vegetable fats 35 years ago, we’ve also consumed and used ever-greater quantities of palm oil from south-east Asia. Its production has been responsible for the near annihilation of many species, including orangutans, pigmy elephants and Sumatran elephants, rhinos and tigers. With demand still growing, similar pressures are now building in equatorial countries in Africa and South America where palm oil production is also taking off. The scientists behind some of the most recent research on species decline blame “human overpopulation and continued population growth, and overconsumption, especially by the rich”, rather than livestock production specifically.
The importance of livestock grazing for wild plants and animals
We also need to remember that many important plant and wildlife species have evolved in tandem with grazing animals and depend on them for their survival, a point made very strongly by Natural England in their report, The Importance of Livestock Grazing for Wildlife Conservation. This is a key reason why the RSPB uses cattle on its reserves, and states that livestock farming is “essential to preserving wildlife and [the] character of iconic landscapes”. And while overgrazing, encouraged by poorly conceived support schemes, has been a problem in the past, the RSPB is concerned that “undergrazing is now occurring in some areas, with adverse impacts on some species, such as golden plover”, while also “contributing to the spread of ranker grasses, rush, scrub and bracken”. Extensively grazed grasslands also have a wide range of additional benefits. They purify drinking water better than any other land use, and they provide food for pollinating insects at times of year when there is little else available. They also store vast amounts of carbon, which if released through conversion to continuous crop production, would accelerate global warming even faster than it is currently occurring.
Food security
Livestock production may only provide 37% of total protein globally, but it clearly provides significantly more than that in the UK. Two-thirds of UK farmland – if we include common land and rough grazing – is under grass, most of that for important environmental reasons. Only 12% of this (8% of total farmland) is classified as arable, meaning that it may, under current EU rules, be ploughed for cropping. Much of this is on farms which grow grass in rotation with crops to build fertility naturally and control weeds, pests and diseases, so when one field of arable grassland is ploughed up another is generally re-sown with grass. If we were to stop grazing cattle and sheep on this land, we would greatly reduce our food security and make ourselves vulnerable, if, for example, extreme weather due to climate change, or a new crop disease were to reduce global soya yields. We would also need to import a very great deal more food, because as I have previously shown, cattle consume only about 5% of the 3.1 million tonnes of soya oil, beans and meal we import (1.1 million tonnes of the 3.1 million tonnes imported is fed to livestock, of which cattle consume only 15%) and sheep consume very little indeed.
The problem with global averages
So far, I’ve rather ducked the key issue of the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock production. Before we can make much progress on this we need first to consider the issue of global average emission figures. Looking at global averages and drawing conclusions from them isn’t actually very helpful. Essentially a small proportion of grazing livestock animals cover a high proportion of the land area and emit a high proportion of the greenhouse gases, while producing only a very small proportion of the meat and milk. The authors of the research paper say, “For many products, impacts are skewed by producers with particularly high impacts…..for beef originating from beef herds, the highest impact 25% of producers represent 65% of the beef herds’ GHG emissions and 61% of land use.”
Simplistically, we might think the obvious answer is to eliminate the 25% of producers who are causing such a large part of the problem. However, this 25% of producers mostly live in dryland regions, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, areas which often have very poor soils and low rainfall. As such their animals grow very slowly, but it is claimed, still produce a lot of methane, because they have to eat very poor-quality herbage. No doubt, people living in the Global South could reduce their carbon footprint from food significantly if they gave up meat and dairy, but they would also very quickly starve.
Approximately a quarter of the global population live in dryland regions where severe droughts are an ever-present threat. Farming families, depending entirely on crops, would have no food at all when the rains fail. In contrast, animals put on flesh in the better years and provide a substantial buffer against starvation, since they can be slaughtered and eaten one by one over significant periods of time in drought years. It also has to be pointed out that unlike many of us in the Global North, who mostly have cars, central heating and fly abroad, the emissions associated with meat consumption in the drylands in the Global South are more or less the only carbon footprint these people have, and amount to just a small fraction of our own.
This aspect also helps us to see how misleading even the headlines on the percentage of land used for livestock production can be, when the very large areas of land in dryland regions are averaged with the grasslands in more fertile regions.
It is also significant that global averages cited by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in Livestock’s Long Shadow in 2006 (and two other reports in 2013) were dramatically increased by the inclusion of the emissions associated with the destruction of rainforest and virgin land for cattle grazing and soya production, most of which took place before 2005. These were tragic events with multiple causes, but ones which have little relevance to grazing livestock production and beef consumption in the UK, where the predominant land use changes occurring at the time were entirely in the opposite direction – the conversion of grassland to crop production and the planting of trees.
Beef and sheep production in Northern Europe, especially the UK and Ireland, is highly productive and this greatly reduces the carbon footprint of beef and lamb in these regions. These countries have climates and soil types ideally suited to growing grass and only marginally suited to crop production. So using global average figures for the UK also tells us nothing of value.
The scientific debate
I have written to a number of scientists about these issues over the last week, including one of the authors of the research paper, Joseph Poore. Both he and I recognise that there are huge differences in the emissions associated with beef produced in different production systems and that an objective should be to improve systems, wherever possible, to reduce their carbon footprint. While the headlines have focused on the worst examples – beef linked to emissions of between 40 and 210 kg of carbon dioxide (CO2) per kilo – the research study does actually provide data for the second most productive category of beef production which emit 18.2 kg of CO2 per kilo of beef produced.
For anyone not familiar with how these figures are obtained it may help to know that despite being expressed in terms of the greenhouse gas (GHG) CO2, the emissions from beef mostly relate to methane (CH4) and to a lesser extent nitrous oxide (N2O). In order to compare emissions from different sources, these are expressed in terms of CO2 equivalent, based on the relative global warming impacts of the different GHGs, CH4 and N2O, approximately 30 and 300 times higher, respectively, than CO2.
The figures cited in the research paper are global close-to-best, overall average and close-to-worst, but in correspondence, Poore has helpfully given me further information, which shows that beef from the UK dairy herd is typically responsible for emissions in the range 17-27 kg CO2 per kilo. I’ll express this as an average of 22kg CO2 per kilo of beef to make the calculations later on, less complex. While it is generally assumed that dairy beef has lower emissions than suckler beef, and that could be the case on farms with late maturing cattle, figures for the 100% organic grass-fed beef produced on my own farm suggest that emissions are no higher than 17 kg per kilo of beef, and may even be lower – I can’t do a complete calculation because I don’t have figures for all aspects, for example, the electricity costs at the abattoir where our animals are slaughtered and refrigerated before being brought back to our butchers shop, or the GHG costs of making our hay.
Methane
Despite all this, we cannot pretend that the direct greenhouse gases from grass-fed beef are insignificant. Nevertheless, methane (CH4) breaks down (largely in the atmosphere, and to a lesser extent in soils not receiving ammonium-based nitrogen fertilisers) to CO2 and water after about 10 years. If we contrast grassland with little or no nitrogen fertiliser use with food systems which depend heavily on nitrogen fertiliser, the carbon in the CO2 and the CH4 from grass-fed ruminants is recycled, not fossil, carbon. Ruminants can’t add more to the atmosphere than the plants they eat can photosynthesise from the atmosphere.
The high methane levels in the atmosphere are a very serious problem, but they have become a problem not so much because of cattle and sheep – the numbers of which have increased only modestly over the last 40 years – but because of fossil fuels. Taken together, the fossil fuels, oil, natural gas and coal are not only by far the biggest source of the major GHG CO2, they are also responsible for about a third more methane emissions than ruminants – and all the carbon in that CH4 is, of course, additional carbon that has been stored away deep underground for the last 400 million years. That’s all based on long-established data. But a more recent study analysing the relative amounts of the isotopes carbon12 and carbon14, which vary according to the source of the methane, has found that scientists have previously under-estimated methane emissions from fossil fuels by 20-60% and over-estimated those from microbial sources, such as the rumen bacteria which produce methane, by 25%. That doesn’t affect the figures in Poore and Nemecek’s paper, but it does help us to see more clearly the relative importance of reducing fossil fuel use compared with red meat consumption. In that respect, re-localising food systems, discouraging supermarkets from centralising their distribution networks, consuming the foods most readily produced in the UK and minimising imports would surely be a good start?
Soil carbon sequestration
Unlike some leading campaigners and scientists who call for big reductions in ruminant numbers and largely dismiss the significance of soil carbon sequestration, Poore and Nemecek accept that carbon sequestration under grassland can, under certain circumstances, for a finite period, offset a significant proportion of the emissions from cattle and sheep. According to them the maximum extent of this is a reduction of just over one-fifth (22%) of the emissions. However, since they cite no UK-specific data in their study it is not clear whether this has any relevance to the UK or whether it is simply a global average.
About half of soil organic matter is made up of carbon. The rest is mostly nitrogen and water. Organic matter is critically important to long term soil resilience and water-holding ability. The general assumption amongst scientists is that organic matter levels fall, year on year when grassland is converted to cropland, and eventually stabilise at a new lower level on clay-based soils after a century or more. Peat-based and sandy soils are an exception as. In contrast, the conversion of croplands to grass will rebuild that carbon over broadly the same period. Overstocked land will also lose carbon. Ley/arable rotations will see levels go up and down depending on the phase of the rotation and the proportion of arable to grass crops.
As such, long-established, many well managed soils under permanent grassland in the UK are probably already close to their maximum potential level of carbon. However, virtually all heavily stocked UK grasslands have the potential to sequester more carbon if their management is improved and all croplands could steadily regain carbon if they were converted to grass or to rotations including grass breaks. Since a third of soils globally are significantly degraded and another 20% moderately degraded the global potential for carbon sequestration is considerable.
Confusion has arisen due to the very significant variation between the rates of sequestration found in many studies. However, a review of 42 studies in 2014 found that more than half these differences could be explained by considering whether or not livestock manures were returned to the land. It seems likely, based on other research, that much of the remaining differences will relate to land management, stocking levels and precipitation levels. Deeper rooting grasses, legumes and herbs also have the potential to increase carbon down to much greater depths than the most widely used ryegrasses which are shallow-rooting.
Undertaking a calculation
Can we find a way of relating the emissions associated with beef to other things we do to get some idea of their relative significance? I’ll use the average 22 kg of CO2 for beef from the UK dairy herd (established above) as it’s the only solid figure I have for the UK. In 2015 and 2016, according the AHDB’s UK yearbook – cattle, average beef consumption per person in the UK was 18.2 kg and average consumption of lamb was 4.9 kg. So we can now undertake a calculation to establish the carbon footprint of a typical beef and lamb consumer.
- Beef 18.2 x 22 = 400.4 kg carbon dioxide equivalent
- Lamb 4.9 x 25 = 122 kg carbon dioxide equivalent (based on figures in the study)
On this basis an average British beef and lamb consumer is responsible for the equivalent of 522 kg of CO2, as a result of their red meat consumption. This doesn’t of course include the emissions associated with chicken and pork, but to get some idea of whether giving up red meat is the single most important thing you can do to save the planet, I used an online calculator to work out how much CO2 was emitted as a result of SFT chief executive Patrick Holden’s return flight from Heathrow to Stockholm for the 2018 EAT forum this week. That comes to 466 kg of CO2. Undertaking a similar exercise for the round trip journey by car from his farm in Wales to Heathrow adds another 110 kg, making a total of 576 kg carbon dioxide, for one trip to a nearby country, compared with 522 kg for a whole year’s worth of red meat eating.
One question which therefore arises from this is whether the repeated focus on red meat as a source of global warming is misleading the entire population into assuming that providing they don’t eat red meat they can travel abroad as much as they like with a clear conscience? It’s of note that a roundtrip from Heathrow to San Francisco is equivalent to about 5 year’s-worth of beef and lamb produced in the UK – and quite a few of the vegetarian and vegan campaigners at the EAT forum had come from the US.
Why we need grazing livestock
More than all these issues, however, the SFT defends the role of grazing animals, as we know from years of practical farming experience that systems with cattle or sheep at their core are able to remain highly productive, repair degraded soils and avoid the GHG emissions associated with the manufacture of nitrogen fertiliser, equivalent to about 8 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of nitrogen used. Farmers growing bread-making wheat and oilseed rape in the UK use up to 250 kg of nitrogen per hectare, meaning that each hectare puts GHGs equivalent to 2 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, just in relation to nitrogen. About half of this nitrogen is lost to the environment and has a wide range of negative impacts on soils, water, the air and on our health. This diffuse pollution has major negative costs for society, estimated by scientists to be 2-3 times higher than the commercial benefits farmers get from using nitrogen fertiliser.
In contrast, using forage legumes, like clover, instead, allows nitrogen to be built up in the soil under grazing swards without any GHG emissions. This can then be exploited to grow crops in subsequent years, before going back to grass and clover. Such grassland systems are almost as productive as those using the highest rates of nitrogen fertiliser. Grain yields are lower, but if we move away from grain-fed livestock that won’t matter. Grain legumes like beans and peas do also fix some nitrogen naturally, but it is not enough to make a significant contribution to reducing nitrogen use in subsequent crops. In addition, not all cropland in the UK is suitable for growing peas, and it’s not possible to grow beans more than one year in five, even with repeated applications of herbicides, fungicides and insecticides.
In conclusion
Clearly there are significant emissions associated with meat production, and it may well be that, in general, grass-fed beef has slightly higher direct emissions than grain-fed beef. I can see big advantages, both environmental and ethical in reducing the production and consumption of grain-fed meat, be it chicken, pork or beef. But there is an overwhelmingly important case why we should continue to produce and eat meat from animals predominantly reared on grass, especially when it is species-rich and not fertilised with nitrogen out of a bag.
Yet, while a few farmers are trying their best to counter the prevailing trends by producing organic or grass-fed meat, far more cattle are now being housed in American-style feedlots, as recently exposed by the Guardian. Ironically this trend is occurring largely due to the failure of scientists, journalists and campaigners to understand the full significance of the differences between farming systems, and therefore the red meat which brings major benefits as well as a few negative impacts, compared with that which only has negative impacts. Due to falling demand for red meat, smaller, more traditional farmers are being forced to choose between giving up – something which has now affected tens of thousands of them – and intensifying, in order to cut costs and stay in business. I very much hope we can find a way to broaden understanding of these issues, because if we can’t, we will see the further spread of most intensive beef systems and we will lose the iconic pastoral character of the British countryside.
Copyright © 2018 with Richard Young, republished with permission. The Sustainable Food Trust is a UK registered charity, charity number 1148645. Company number 7577102.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 27, 2018 | Indigenous Autonomy
Featured image: Marie Persson Njajta, Stefan Mikaelsson och Mona Persson, members of the Sami Parliament with the proposal to support the Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth
by Rights of Nature Sweden / Intercontinental Cry
During the Assembly meeting May 25th, the Sami Parliament decided to support the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. The Declaration includes the right of Mother Earth and her beings to life and existence, respect, to regenerate its biocapacity and to continue its vital cycles and processes free from human disruptions. The Sami, like many other indigenous peoples, have everyday experiences of how climate change hits directly for example reindeer husbandry. Their traditional ways of life is hard-pressed between climate change and exploitative mining projects and forestry. The parliamentary motion was written by Marie Persson Njajta together with Mona Persson, members of the Sami Parliament. It was signed by several other members. Marie Persson Njajta hopes that the decision gives power to the discussion on how Rights of Nature can be implemented on local, national and global level.
This is a very important decision, says Marie Persson Njajta. We wrote it for our children and the possibilities for coming generations to live a good life. We believe a paradigm shift is needed towards a view where humans understand ourselves as part of nature, which is the way indigenous people relate to nature. We, the Sami people, believe that we belong to the land, not the other way around. Today we see how a colonial perspective, exploitation, and climate change threaten our culture. And it is not just us; it is a global issue. Governments and corporations don´t take these problems seriously, but disregard indigenous rights. The decision to support the Universal Declaration for the Rights of Mother Earth is a statement against the shortsightedness of governmental policy and the failing view that corporations have rights while nature does not.
The decision of the Sami Parliament is a vital step in strengthening the Rights of Nature framework, says Pella Larsdotter Thiel, from the Rights of Nature network in Sweden. Sweden has a high profile internationally in sustainability issues, but like other countries, we systematically deplete and impoverish our ecosystems. It is very encouraging that the Sami people in Sweden, like indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, take the lead in this necessary shift in how we view nature; from a resource for humans to a living whole we participate in.
The Declaration was first presented at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Bolivia, which in 2010 gathered more than 35,000 people from over 100 countries. It has since been presented to the UN General Assembly, and over 800,000 people have signed for the UN to adopt the declaration. Cormac Cullinan, lawyer and spokesperson for Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature who led the drafting of the Declaration, welcomes the historic decision of the Sami Parliament.
By endorsing the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, the Parliament and the Sami people have joined forces with the many indigenous peoples, local communities, organizations and people throughout the world who are working together to reawaken consumerist societies to the reality that our first duty as human beings is to recognize and respect the rights of every member of the Earth community to play their unique role in that community. The Sami have never forgotten to be grateful and respectful to Nature for giving us life – by supporting the Declaration they are signaling their commitment to reminding all who have forgotten that our future depends on giving effective legal protection to the whole Earth community.
This year sees the 10th anniversary of the first major decision on Nature’s Rights, Ecuador included Rights of Nature in its constitution in 2008. The framework is now spreading rapidly with decisions about rivers, forests and mountains as legal subjects in, among others, the New Zealand Parliament, the Supreme Court of Colombia and the Supreme Court of the Indian State of Uttarpradesh.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 12, 2018 | Obstruction & Occupation
by Zad Forever
We are writing with the smell of tear gas rising from our fingers. The springtime symphony of birdsong is punctuated by the explosive echo of concussion grenades. Our eyes are watering, less from the gas than the sadness; because our friends’ homes, barns and organic farms are being destroyed. Bulldozers, supported by 2500 riot police, armored vehicles, helicopters and drones, are rampaging through these forests, pastures and wetlands to crush the future we are building here on the to the zad (The zone à defendre).
We are calling on you to take solidarity actions everywhere, it could be holding demos at your local french embassy or consulate, or taking actions against any suitable symbol (corporate or otherwise) of France! And if you are not too far away, bring your disobedient bodies to join us on the zone. If the French government evicts the zad, it will be like evicting hope.
For fifty years, this unique chequerboard landscape was the site of a relentless struggle against yet another climate wrecking infrastructure – a new airport for the nearby city of Nantes. Farmers and villagers, activists and naturalists, squatters and trade unionists wove an unbreakable ecology of struggle together and three months ago on the 17th of January, the French government announced that the airport project would be abandoned. But this incredible victory, won through a diversity of creative tactics from petitions to direct action, legal challenges to sabotage, had a dark shadow. In the same breath that declared the abandonment, came the announcement that the people occupying these 4000 acres of liberated territory, the 300 of us living and farming in 80 different collectives, would be evicted because we dared not just to be against the airport, but its WORLD as well.
Since that victorious day, the battle has transformed itself and is now no longer about a destructive infrastructure project, but about sharing the territory we inhabit. We stoped this place from being covered in concrete and so it is up to us to take care of its future. The movement therefore maintains that we should have the right to manage the land as a commons (see its declaration The Six Points for the Zad because there will never be an Airport). Today this is the struggle of the zad (zone to defend) of Notre Dame Des Landes.
The zad was launched in 2009 after a letter (distributed during the first french climate camp here) written by locals inviting people to occupy the zone and squat the abandoned farmhouses. Now the zone has become one of Europe’s largest laboratory of commoning. With its bakeries, pirate radio station, tractor repair workshop, brewery, anarchitectural cabins, banqueting hall, medicinal herb gardens, a rap studio, dairy, vegetable plots, weekly newspaper, flour mill, library and even a surrealist lighthouse. It has become a concrete experiment in taking back control of everyday life.
In 2012 the French state’s attempt to evict the zone to build the airport was fiercely resisted, despite numerous demolitions 40,000 people turned up to rebuild and the government withdrew. The police have not set foot on the zad since, that is, until Monday morning, when at 3am the gendarmes pierced into the zone.
On day one they destroyed some of the most beautiful cabins and barns, but yesterday we stopped the cops from getting to the Vraies Rouge, which happens to be where one of our negotiators with the government lives. Destroying the house of those that agreed to sit at the table with you was a strategic mistake. The fabulous zad press team used this as the media hook and today we are winning the battle of the story. If enough people get to the zone over the next days we could win the battle on the territory as well. We need rebel everything, from cooks to medics, fighters to witnesses. We doubt this rural revolt will be finished before the weekend, when we are also calling people to come and rebuild en mass.
Already solidarity demonstrations have taken place in over 100 cities across France, whilst the town halls of several towns were occupied. Zapatistas demonstrated in Chiapas Mexico, there were actions in Brussels, Spain, Lebanon, London, Poland, Palestine and New York and the underground carpark of the french embassy in Munich was sabotaged. They will never be able to evict our solidarity.
Post your reports on twitter @zad_nddl #zad #nddl and to our solidarity action email soutienzad@riseup.net for more info in English see Zad Forever and watch this video to see what is being destroyed.
