As farmers have to accept climate change is impacting them on many levels, they have worked to organise their farms to be more resilient. Here is an example of a flood plan in Wales, a country, more often than not, hit by flooding:
And farmers are trying to move away from livestock rearing to horticultural to reduce carbon emissions which exacerbate greenhouse gases which are warming the planet, leading to devastating weather events:
Since 2022, farmers are being encouraged to study the Soil on their land, the importance of worms and their processes.
Soil health is at its heart. The aim is to improve or restore soils that have been degraded by rebuilding soil organic matter and increasing soil biology.
Too much fertiliser harms plants. Restoring damaged soil by encouraging microbes to reinhabit the Soil through rotation of crops (which the Romans taught the Britons when they occupied parts of Britain) – see
On reading the Soil Association report ‘ An agroecological Europe in 2050: multifunctional agriculture for healthy eating’, I am struck by the soundness of this 10 year effort in Europe to move to Agro-ecological methodologies to provide sustainable farming methods without harmful pesticides and fertilisers. The cost-benefit analysis ensures the outcome is healthy food grown in an ecologically balanced environment which follows a pre-industrialised approach to farming. The analysis, after 10 years of effort to transition to these methods, is assisting a strategy to increase food security for Europe.
It is common knowledge that diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease are increasing world wide. The way we produce and consume food is one of many factors causing this spiralling of health quality.
Agroecology offers cleaner environments, diversity of wildlife, cleaner water, less stress on the environment and thus people.
We will move to an understanding of food quality where we will eat less but gain all the nutrition we need from a range of foods we grow with the seasons within each of our countries. Farmers will no longer import soybean meal for their livestock. Farmers will not die prematurely from working with toxic chemicals on the farm. Farmers need not race to equip themselves with the latest expensive gadgetry and so reduce their energy use and stocking of pesticides in order to kill pests which are caught in the vicious cycle of becoming tolerant to the poisons.
Farmers will do more with less, by using inputs and resources more efficiently.
Support for small farms has not been the trend, instead they have been bought out to create corporate size farms. This trend goes against the guardianship of land where hedges, diverse plant life, trees and clean water infrastructure once existed and need to be restored to return the land to a balanced ecosystem to benefit community life.
An organically farmed Europe can feed a growing population a healthy diet
The ‘Ten Years for Agroecology in Europe’ report models a future where farming in Europe can respond to climate change, phase out pesticides and maintain vital biodiversity, whilst providing a sufficient and healthy diet for a growing population.
• feed the European population healthily • maintain the export capacity • reduce Europe’s global food footprint • result in a 40 percent reduction in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions • help to restore biodiversity and to protect natural resources
A transition to a fully agroecological Europe will require dietary change, particularly a shift towards ‘less and better meat’, with diets reorientated around plant-based proteins and higher welfare grass-fed livestock.
The Government must support the transition through The Agriculture Bill by establishing agroecology as the underlying principle of farming in England, rewarding farmers for employing agroecological systems such as organic.
Farmers – especially those already pioneering agroecological farming, from conservation agriculture to agroforestry and organic – should be given a seat at the table in the debate around land-use, climate change and biodiversity.
Biodiversity impacts, imported emissions, and the need to reduce or eliminate pesticide and fertiliser use, should be given greater weighting in the next Climate Change Committee land-use report. The UK’s response to climate change must be coherent with broader ecological objectives.
Watch Helen Browning, Soil Association CEO, talk about agroecology
Helen talks about how agroecology could drive improvements to human and environmental health at a European Level.
TYFA is based on the assumption that, in order to address biodiversity and climate change issues, a transformation of European patterns of production and consumption is inevitableIDDRI, TYFA Report
AuthorsTen Years for Agroecology in Europe was written by IDDRI, a French, independent policy research institute in collaboration with consultancy firm AScA and a council of researchers. Soil Association has worked with the authors to bring the English translation of this ground-breaking research to the UK.Download full report
I am now reading Ronen Bergman’s book, ‘Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations’. It is an illuminating book. So much to learn about how we humans damage each other beyond repair until we yearn to ‘Rise and Kill First’ to avoid being ‘lambs to the slaughter.’
Here is an extract from an early section of the book:
Ben-Gurion foresaw that a Jewish state would soon be established in Palestine and that the new nation would immediately be forced to fight a war against Arabs in Palestine and repel invasions by the armies of neighboring Arab states. The Haganah command thus also began secretly preparing for this all-out war, and as part of the preparations, an order code-named Zarzir (or Starling) was issued, providing for the assassination of the heads of the Arab population of Palestine. WHILE THE HAGANAH SLOWLY stepped up the use of targeted killings, the radical undergrounds had their killing campaign in full motion, trying to push the British out of Palestine. Yitzhak Shamir, now in command of Lehi, resolved not only to eliminate key figures of the British Mandate locally—killing CID personnel and making numerous attempts to do the same to the Jerusalem police chief, Michael Joseph McConnell, and the high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael—but also Englishmen in other countries who posed a threat to his political objective. Walter Edward Guinness, more formally known as Lord Moyne, for example, was the British resident minister of state in Cairo, which was also under British rule. The Jews in Palestine considered Moyne a flagrant anti-Semite who had assiduously used his position to restrict the Yishuv’s power by significantly reducing immigration quotas for Holocaust survivors. Shamir ordered Moyne killed. He sent two Lehi operatives, Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri, to Cairo, where they waited at the door to Moyne’s house. When Moyne pulled up, his secretary in the car with him, Hakim and Bet-Zuri sprinted to the car. One of them shoved a pistol through the window, aimed it at Moyne’s head, and fired three times. Moyne gripped his throat. “Oh, they’ve shot us!” he cried, and then slumped forward in his seat. Still, it was an amateurish operation. Shamir had counseled his young killers to arrange to escape in a car, but instead they fled on slow-moving bicycles. Egyptian police quickly apprehended them, and Hakim and Bet-Zuri were tried, convicted, and, six months later, hanged.
But, as the author then goes on to say, many more atrocities against the British ensued, and the perpetrators were named as “a new group of gangsters” by Churchill.
As India obtained independence from the British Empire, so finally the costs of maintaining a Palestinian Protectorate became too costly and the role of the British in Palestine was replaced with the new state of Israel. The armed forces and intelligence community sprang out of ‘ the men who fought that bloody underground war – guerrillas, assassins, terrorists.’
A surprising (to me) piece of history was how during WW2, the Nazi presence replaced the British through the existing German Templer sect who had settled in Palestine in the late 1800s. See:
Their presence was eliminated by those Jews who went to Europe and witnessed the atrocities of the Holocaust.
And those who have been slaughtered like lambs will now ‘Rise and Kill First’.
I have been trying to understand this perpetual cycle where people living peacefully somewhere on earth find themselves rounded up and slaughtered by others they never knew and for reasons they don’t understand. Once the bloody tale is related, others rise up to seek revenge and the killing cycle continues as it has throughout human history.
This seems to be an inbuilt mechanism triggered by an emotion we recognise as hatred. But it is also a disgust in that part of us which simply seeks to live in peace and love our fellow man.
Nature’s Decline Deepens: Insights from the Living Planet Report 2024
29 October 2024
The Living Planet Report 2024 reveals that wildlife populations have dropped 73% on average since 1970. It warns that national governments are failing to meet biodiversity targets and calls for an urgent need to transform our current economic and food systems, but it only skirts around the issue of continued global population growth. Campaigns and Media Officer Madeleine Hewitt dives into the report.
Every two years WWF, in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), publishes an updated Living Planet Report. This is compiled from the Living Planet Index which monitors the size of wildlife populations and how they have changed since 1970.
The Living Planet Report can provide an overall outlook on how biodiversity – a measure of the variability of species on land and in marine environments – is faring on the planet.
WWF’s Living Planet Report 2024 estimates that we have lost 73% of all vertebrate wildlife populations since 1970. That’s nearly three-quarters of all birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Gone in just 50 years. During that time, our population has more than doubled, increasing from 3.7 billion to over 8.1 billion today.
Failing Biodiversity Targets
We recently sponsored our partner, Women for Conservation, to attend COP16 in Cali, Colombia. Governments were tasked with reviewing their commitments to the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international treaty signed by almost 200 countries, including the UK, to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.
However, according to the Living Planet Report, national commitments are falling far short of what’s needed to protect nature.
Currently, over half the Sustainable Development Goals targets for 2030 will be missed. And national biodiversity strategies and action plans are inadequate and lack support.Women for Conservation Team at COP16
Failing biodiversity targets pushes the world toward dangerous ‘tipping points’ as ecosystems reach their natural limits.
For example, the Amazon Rainforest is considered one of the most important areas for biodiversity in the world. But the Amazon is under threat from climate change and increasing deforestation causing reduced rainfall, destabilising the wet conditions needed for a tropical rainforest.
A tipping point looms if humans clear just 20–25% of the Amazon rainforest – dangerously close, with an estimated 14–17% already deforested. Crossing the Amazon’s tipping point would be disastrous for the millions of people and species dependent upon the rainforest.
Governments are also failing to meet their climate commitments to limit average global temperature rises to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Existing national climate commitments would lead to an average global temperature increase of 3°C. This will have catastrophic effects for people and the planet.
Unsustainable Food Systems
Experts identify food production as one of the main drivers of nature decline. It’s the leading cause of habitat loss – with forests, wetlands, and other biodiversity hotspots cleared for agriculture.
Humans use over 40% of habitable land for food production. Crop production accounts for 70% of freshwater use. And the entire food sector is responsible for over a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions.
Our current food systems are environmentally destructive, unsustainable, and plagued by structural inequalities. Despite record food production, 735 million people still go hungry, whilst obesity rates rise elsewhere.
Continued global population growth places even more pressure to intensify and expand agriculture causing further nature loss.
The Living Planet Report 2024 includes a bold call to action for the world to re-examine its current economic systems. To move away from economic systems focused on the extraction and overexploitation of natural resources for profit to a system that values nature.
In recent weeks, we’ve been exploring alternative economic models that move away from GDP as the sole marker of economic success. We have looked at many models that prioritise people’s well-being and the environment instead.
The Living Planet Report 2024 joins many alternative economists in urgently calling for a better economic system that benefits both people and the planet.
Different approaches to economic growth will be necessary to address the global goals depending on a country’s economic status. We need to move beyond economic wealth and GDP as the principal measures of progress, toward a well-being economy that promotes sufficient shared prosperity and living in a way that regenerates nature and stabilizes the climate.Living Planet Report 2024
What about population?
Frustratingly, the Living Planet Report only includes a fleeting reference to population growth as an underlying cause of continued nature decline.
…the root causes of nature degradation. These include consumption and production patterns, human population dynamics and trends, trade, technological innovations, and inadequate or failed local to global governance.Living Planet Report 2024
Even though population growth underpins multiple drivers of habitat loss including:
More people need ever more food. Land clearing and pesticide run-off from intensive agriculture causes up to 80% of extinction threats to mammal and bird species.
More people need ever more space. Damaging human activity continues to encroach on natural environments, with humans expected to expand into 50% more land by 2070 – increasing human-wildlife conflict and nature loss.
More people need more things. Our population’s relentless consumption of resources such as timber, oil and minerals is continuing to destroy natural habitats around the globe.
The continued reluctance to address population growth as a driver of biodiversity loss only further stalls progress. It is especially frustrating when the positive solutions available to address population include the holistic Population Health Environment (PHE) approach. PHE improves health outcomes for the local community and protects natural habitats.
For this reason, we’re proud to have sent our partners, Women for Conservation, to COP16 to promote the benefits of the PHE approach. And we’ll continue our work to emphasise why population matters when it comes to protecting biodiversity.
It has been growing there for 55 million years. The human race was around 1 million 10,000 years BC. Since the industrial revolution we are now over 8 billion and have wrought irrevocable destruction to the planet.
The Amazon rainforest spreads across nine countries namely Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, Suriname, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Guyana, and French Guiana. Some of these countries hold a bigger part of the Amazon forest than others.
The tragedy of the fires in the precious wetlands of the Pantanal, killing rare wildlife, has been so appalling. All caused by an ever warming planet due to deforestation and fossil fuel use.
The insanity of global corporates accelerating their plundering of the Amazon rainforest through aggressive tactics, bribery and sheer criminal activities is now so blatant it is as if these corporates are driving a dagger into our ecosystem’s heart.
Since the early 2000s the engineering firm, Odebrecht S.A, has been busy committing crimes and finally exposed for its criminal behaviour over the past 15 years.
The company was founded in 1944 and is headquartered in Salvador da Bahia and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
After Marcelo Odebrecht served his jail sentence he is now renaming the business:
Now Novonor “is born as the holding company of a business group with 25,000 employees and six companies” working in engineering, construction, urban mobility and roads, oil and gas, real estate, petrochemicals and the naval industry, the statement said.
Who has been bribed by Odebrecht?
of his links to Odebrecht corruption.
Former Peruvian President Alan Garcia committed suicide in April when police went to his home to arrest him on charges related to Odebrecht. Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra and three former presidents, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Ollanta Humala and Alejandro Toledo, are all under investigation in connection with the Odebrecht scandal. Humala has been indicted on corruption charges.
Politicians in Guatemala and Colombia have been engulfed, too.
Successive Peruvian Presidents have been investigated for accepting lucrative bribes from Odebrecht, for example, to approve the building of the deforestation causing Oceanic Highway:
The shrinking Amazon has seen indigenous tribes losing their land where they lived as guardians of the forest. Rare plants have been destroyed, many providing important medicines to the pharmaceutical research labs. All the wild animals among their specialised habitats are disregarded as the loggers cut down this ancient forest.
And all this activity is to contribute wealth to those who deny their activities are accelerating climate change catastrophes around the world.
As the oceans become too hot we see catastrophic weather events around the world occurring so fast alerts cannot be sent out in time to protect people from the horrific consequences.
But corporates are blinded by their greed, intent on their plunder. Odebrecht is only one corporate with blood on its hands.
Corporations should be our servants, not our masters.
The vast majority of Americans would find abhorrent a Republican-dominated Supreme Court that comes down repeatedly for corporations against workers, consumers, and the environment, and, that allows unlimited corporate campaign contributions and unbridled corporate power over ordinary voters.
Nader, 3rd Nov 2024
Corruption linked to industry, particularly the construction industry, is nothing new. Here is a 2022 UK article about tight rules and vigilance required to meet the problem head on:
I am reading ‘Who could ever love you’ by Mary Trump. I have just read a chilling few paragraphs which are even more relevant now than in 2017, as the Israeli war on Palestinians and Lebanese rages forever on:
A week after he took office, I was sitting on the couch in my living room, doom-scrolling through Twitter with MSNBC on in the background, when the news about Donald’s Muslim ban broke. I jumped to my feet and paced around the room as the chaos unfolded and the details, as muddled as they were at first, made clear just how far-reaching and depraved the ban was meant to be, thanks to its chief architect, the unspeakably vile Stephen Miller. The contours of the horrors Donald and his chosen deputies planned to inflict on us started to come into focus less than a week after the inauguration. I was staring at the TV in disbelief from my position in the middle of the room when my daughter, a sophomore in high school, came through the front door. I didn’t ask her how school was; I didn’t ask if she wanted a snack or if she had any homework. I said, “Av, do you understand what’s going on?” My voice was raised, and she took a step back. “This is fascism.” I gestured at the television and she looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “He’s a fascist.” That’s when I recognized the extent to which my fate had become intertwined with Donald’s. Beyond the election itself, that was the first chink in the armor of American democracy (to the extent it existed), which wasn’t nearly as strong as many of us had believed. It wasn’t immediately clear, but in the days that followed, the Republicans and the Supreme Court revealed that they were not just inclined but eager to let Donald have his way and, in many cases, enable him. I watched every day as things got worse. Each new transgression landed like a blow. This was America now. At random moments throughout the days that followed, I thought, How is it possible? How can this have happened? I mean, Jesus Christ, it’s Donald. Donald! Whenever this reality became conscious, a jolt hit me between the ribs and I felt like I was hallucinating. But I was screaming into a void. The least worthy, the most vile among us had won—again. He was going to get away with it—again. I could barely move beneath the weight of the unfairness of it all.
Wouldn’t you think the Republican Party, that is as gung-ho for Empire and Genocide as the Democratic Party, but domestically is blatantly open about its policies against women, children, workers, the environment, climate crisis, public lands, public education and fair share taxes for the wealthy would be easy to defeat? Not when you see how the Dems, whose campaigns are controlled by corporate-conflicted political consultants using corporate campaign cash, keep making the election razor close.
In 1988, the formidable spouse of Senator Pat Moynihan – Elizabeth Moynihan – told me “Ralph, these consultants are destroying the Democratic Party,” right after she fired them and took over managing Pat’s last re-election campaign.
Elizabeth Moynihan’s observation is true now more than ever, as corporate money looms gigantically over all elections with no limits on how much these PACs can spend.
Still, with three and a half weeks before November 5th, the Party of the Donkey can lighten some of its self-imposed burdens and prevail in congressional races and the presidential race.
First, Bibi-Biden and Bibi-Blinken have to end their serfdom and stand up for American interests. Tell Netanyahu to stop dissembling, agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, and open up Gaza to all those thousands of U.S.-funded humanitarian aid trucks with food, medicine, water, and other critical supplies. Tell him to open up occupied Gaza to American reporters – along with Israeli and other nations’ journalists – prohibited from independently reporting the realities of the genocidal destruction of that Palestinian enclave and its dying 2.3 million people. Otherwise, no more U.S. weapons of mass destruction, no more vetoes at the UN, and no more arm-twisting other critical countries. These just and proper moves could be vote-getters in swing states.
Second, give the media vote-getting authentic commitments to benefit millions of voters. A serious commitment to a living wage would move millions of low-paid workers to vote.
Raise Social Security benefits, frozen for over 50 years. This would get the attention of 65 million elderly (See the Social Security 2100 Act, a bill introduced on July 12, 2023, by Congressman John B. Larson and Senator Richard Blumenthal).
Demand with specifics the raising of taxes on the wealthy. This taps into the 85% of the people backing such a decision.
Crack down on corporate crooks, with specific illustrations on how they harm daily lives and livelihoods. This issue comes in with heavy left-right support.
Respect the millions of midnight shift workers who keep our society going while we sleep. Campaign before midnight shifts at hospitals, factories, all-night stores, police, and fire stations.
The few Democratic operatives who approve the strategies, tactics and messaging are notoriously tone-deaf, defiantly incommunicado to citizen group input – activists who know how, what, and when to communicate to allworkers, consumers, patients, and parents, regardless of their labels. (For effective elaborations, see winningamerica.net).
The Dems have huge amounts of money and when used to pay for ads, often vacuous and irritatingly repetitive, these consulting profiters reap 15% commissions. More of this money should be used for an advanced ground game of locating voters, persuading them, transporting them to the polls if need be, and festively celebrating with a snack or supper. Australians, where voting (for anyone) is a civic duty, are known to make voting a joyous social occasion.
Massively assailing Trump for his lawbreaking, his lies, his bigotry, his corruption, his delusions, his incitements to violence, voter suppression and precinct worker harassment does not seem to diminish support from his base. Why not concentrate laser-like on getting out more of the 80 or 90 million non-voters, instead of pushing off the ballot and harassing the small Green Party with frivolous suits and political bigotry?
Many of these non-voting eligible voters are low-wage workers. Listen to Rev. William Barber who says just increasing their vote by ten to fifteen percent from 2020 would win the election. Few people have interacted with as many impoverished Americans as has Rev. Barber. Even fewer can match the details and inspirations of his oratory. (See, breachrepairers.org).
The media covers the horse race – give them more horses. They cover the money raised – tell them you’re using it for people-to-people voter turnout behind explicit progressive mandates. The media covers spontaneous comments that magnify as faux pas – give them spontaneous statements that mean something – like increasing the number of federal cops on the corporate crime beat.
Or support the expanding interstate compact of states that gives the anti-democratic Electoral College votes to the candidate who wins the national presidential vote (See, NationalPopularVote.com).
Or why not support more consumer cooperatives, or repeal handcuffs on union organizing and expression embodied by the notorious Taft-Hartley Act of 1947?
The media gets bored with the same old stump speech day after day. Give them some variety that invigorates a democratic society. Especially tell them ways you would empower the powerless people to overcome corporatism, apathy, indifference, and withdrawal from elections and politics. These could be short educational addresses on TV.
and, knowing our refusal to move away from dependence on fossil fuels has increased ocean temperatures. We know the high temperatures of the water in the Gulf are causing the intensification of hurricanes in the region.
It is as if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
It will cost billions of dollars to recover from constant and increasing catastrophe from exceptional wildfires, floods, tornadoes, cat 5 hurricanes, droughts……But the conversation runs in parallel to the fossil fuel industry touting their billion dollar productions – plus demand to increase exploration and more DRILLING.
The fossil fuel industry does not help the victims. As people can’t afford insurance, many are made homeless after losing their entire home and belongings. Then new homes are built on the spot where their beloved home once stood, but they can’t afford the bigger home because they are being replaced by richer folk.
There needs to be intense and determined priority given to this subject, worldwide. Where there is Best Practise it must be shared, and constructive action must be taken which does not involve exploitation of vulnerable people.
Best Practise currently costs too much for the vulnerable, but if you can afford it, Hunters Point, Florida weathered the Helene and Milton hurricanes:
borderslynn 
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