Six Select Committees of the House of Commons commissioned the citizens’ assembly to understand public preferences on how the UK should tackle climate change because of the impact these decisions will have on people’s lives. Today Climate Assembly UK hands its work back to the committees with their final report, The path to net zero, issuing strong calls to Parliament and the Government to rise to the challenge of achieving the net zero target in a clear, accountable way.
Assembly made up of members of public says economic recovery should drive move to net zero carbon emissions
Sandra Laville, Environment correspondent for the Guardian, covers the main recommendations of the report (Thu 10 Sep 2020):
The first UK climate assembly made up of members of the public is calling for a tax on frequent flyers, a ban on selling SUVs and a cut in meat consumption as part of the Covid-19 economic recovery.
The assembly was made up of 108 people from all walks of life, who took part in meetings to discuss reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
A final report of the assembly said recovering from Covid-19 should be used as an opportunity to hit net zero carbon emissions and drive different lifestyles to tackle the climate crisis, including a frequent flyers tax and a reduction in meat and dairy consumption.
A large majority, 79% of the assembly, strongly agreed, or agreed, that economic recovery after the pandemic must be designed to help drive the country to its 2050 net zero target, which was signed into law last year.
These steps should include limits or conditions on investment in high carbon industries, and government encouragement for lifestyles to become more compatible with reaching net zero.
The assembly, which met for 6,000 hours across six weekends over 2020, said strong and clear leadership was needed.
“Leadership to forge a cross-party consensus that allows for certainty, long-term planning and a phased transition,” the report, published on Thursday, said. “This is not the time nor the issue for scoring party political points.”
The assembly examined key areas which need to be addressed, with four experts guiding the members of the public in their decision-making. . It is similar to the model adopted in France by Emmanuel Macron.
Key recommendations in the report included:
Frequent flyer tax for individuals who fly furthest and most often.
Increased government investment in low carbon buses and trains.
An early shift to electric vehicles.
An urgent ban on selling heavily polluting vehicles such as SUVs.
Grants for people to buy low-carbon cars.
A reduction in the amount we use cars by 2–5% per decade.
Making wind and solar energy a key part of how the UK reaches net zero.
Greater reliance on local produce and local food production.
A change in diet – driven by education – to reduce meat and dairy consumption by between 20% and 40%.
Parliament agreed in June 2019, when Theresa May was prime minister, to set in law a commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
But a recent report by the Institute for Government said the UK government had not yet confronted the scale of the task.
“Meeting the commitment is a more difficult challenge than responding to the coronavirus crisis or getting Brexit done, and will require transformations in every sector of the UK economy, sustained investment over three decades and substantial changes to everyone’s lives,” the report said.
In its final recommendations, the UK climate assembly said there were key themes for the country as it moved towards net zero.
Education and information about climate change and the steps to tackle it was needed for individuals, businesses, government and others.
And any measures taken to cut emissions needed to be applied fairly. “Fair to people with jobs in different sectors. Fair to people with different incomes, travel preferences and housing arrangements. Fair to people who live in different parts of the UK,” the assembly said.
It also called for freedom and choice for individuals and local areas to be embedded in the solutions to cut emissions and said tackling climate change could be beneficial for local communities, high streets and local businesses and boost the economy, promote innovation, improve health and reduce pollution.
Chairs of the six parliamentary select committees that commissioned the assembly report have written to the prime minister, urging him to ensure that the government acts on the recommendations of Climate Assembly UK by “showing leadership at the very highest level of government” ahead of the UK hosting the UN climate summit, COP26, in November 2021.
Darren Jones MP, chair of the business, energy and industrial strategy select committee, said: “The range of voices within these pages reflect our population. The fact that assembly members have been able to arrive at clear recommendations whilst respecting each others’ values and experiences sets an example for us all.
“Participants speak of their learning, how they clarified their views and their respect for each other’s perspectives, even when they didn’t agree. Their voices are front and centre, just as they should be.”
Authoritarian governments silence the voices of the people when they demand justice
Roads to freedom?
Along the LODE Zone LineRe:LODE Radio is especially worried and concerned with the contemptible political violence meted out to the those engaged in legitimate protest in Belarus, by masked State functionaries.
Luke Harding reports for the Guardian (Wed 9 Sep 2020):
Authorities in Belarus have arrested one of the last leading members of an opposition council still free in the country and attempted to enter the Minsk apartment of the Nobel prize-winning writer Svetlana Alexievich.
Unidentified men in ski masks on Wednesday seized Maxim Znak from the office of the country’s opposition coordination council and dragged him out of the building. His associate, Gleb German, said Znak, a lawyer and a member of the body’s presidium, had time to text message “masks” before his phone was grabbed.
Alexievich is now the only member of the council’s seven-person leadership body not in prison or in exile. She said unknown men rang her bell at about 9am local time. It was unclear if they had come to take her away. Alexievich later allowed EU diplomats into her home and spoke to journalists.
She said her “like-minded” friends from the presidium were now either behind bars or had been “thrown out of the country”. Znak was the last one, she said. She suggested, however, that the brutal tactics of Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, to “kidnap the best of us” would not work and that the protest movement would continue.
“Hundreds of others will come to replace those torn from our ranks. It was not the coordination council that revolted. The country revolted,” she said. “I want to repeat what I always say. We were not preparing a coup. We wanted to prevent a split in our country. We wanted a dialogue to start.”
Alexievich – who won the 2015 Nobel prize for literature – called on the Russian intelligentsia to speak out in support of protesters. There have been mass demonstrations in Minsk and other cities following elections a month ago widely seen as rigged. “I want to tell my people I love them. I’m proud of them,” she said.
Last month Alexievich was questioned by Belarusian investigators, who have opened a criminal investigation into members of the coordination council, accusing them of undermining national security by calling for a transfer of power. Her books explore Soviet history. They include first-hand accounts of the Chernobyl disaster and Moscow’s war in Afghanistan.
On Monday masked men seized Maria Kolesnikova, a leading member of the council, from a street in Minsk. She and two other council members were driven to the border early on Tuesday and told to cross into Ukraine. Kolesnikova, however, ripped up her passport and escaped out of a moving car via a window, her colleagues said.
She was promptly rearrested. Kolesnikova is now being held at a ministry of internal affairs pre-trial detention centre in Minsk. Local media reported she had been charged with calling for the seizure of state power and faces between two and five years in jail. Government agents in civilian clothes were seen on Wednesday searching her apartment.
Lukashenko has dismissed the opposition as western stooges and rejected demands from the US and European Union to engage in a dialogue with protesters, who see his 9 August re-election as fraudulent and demand his resignation. Lukashenko claims to have won 80% of the vote.
In recent days Lukashenko’s security forces have stepped up the arrest of activists. Late on Tuesday, police dispersed a few hundred demonstrators rallying in Minsk in solidarity with Kolesnikova and detained at least 45 protesters, according to the Viasna human rights centre. Those arrested included three female poets.
Lukashenko is due to meet Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, for talks this weekend. In an interview with the Kremlin channel RT, he described Putin as his “older brother”. Putin has declined to provide the military assistance Lukashenko has publicly requested, but promised to send a contingent of special forces to Belarus to prop up Lukashenko’s rule if necessary.
Natalia Kaliada, co-founder of the Belarus Free Theatre, said Belarus now faced the prospect of soft hybrid annexation by Moscow. “There will be no military invasion. It will be by economic means Putin will annex Belarus,” she said. “Belarus will start to use the Russian rouble and gradually become a Russian protectorate.”
Kaliada said the EU was “in a coma” over events in Belarus and appeared terrified of offending Putin. “Only Lithuania is playing a good role. Unfortunately what we can expect from European politicians is betrayal again. Lives will be lost in between political games.”
In Washington, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, issued a statement expressing concern about the attempt to expel Kolesnikova and warning that the US and its allies were considering sanctions against Belarus.
Maria Kolesnikova has been one of the most prominent leaders of protests against the re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko.
Shaun Walker and agencies continue reports for the Guardian on the ongoing repression in Belarus (Thu 10 Sep 2020) with the headline and subheading:
Belarus opposition figure says authorities threatened to kill her
Maria Kolesnikova says she was told she would be leaving country ‘alive or in bits’
Shaun Walkerwrites:
Maria Kolesnikova, the Belarusian opposition politician who ripped up her passport to avoid forcible deportation this week, has said security officers put a bag over her head and threatened to kill her in response.
Kolesnikova, a trained flautist and music teacher who has emerged as one of the figureheads of protests against the authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, said she was told by security officers that she would be removed from Belarus “alive or in bits” after she thwarted their plan to dump her in Ukraine by tearing up her passport at the border.
“There were also threats to imprison me for up to 25 years,”Kolesnikova said, according to a complaint filed by her lawyer.
Kolesnikova’s lawyer, Lyudmila Kazak, filed a criminal complaint against Belarusian authorities including the KGB security police for kidnap, illegal detention and threats to kill, the news site Tut.By said.
The complaint was submitted to the state investigative committee. Asked for comment, a representative of the committee, Sergei Kabakovich, said: “At the present moment I have no information about this.”
Kolesnikova’s complaint included the names and ranks of individual officers of the KGB and the organised crime agency whom she accuses of threatening her, and said she would be able to identify them.
She is now being held in the capital, Minsk, where Kazak said she was being questioned on Thursday. Kazak saw her client at a pre-trial detention centre on Wednesday and said she had bruises on her body.
Lukashenko denies rigging the 9 August election, which official results said he won by a landslide, and has cracked down on protesters demanding his resignation. He has refused to talk to the opposition, saying it is bent on wrecking the country.
Despite a month of protests over the election results and subsequent police violence, Lukashenko has made it clear he will not step down, on occasion saying he would rather die than give up power. Inaugurating a new chief prosecutor on Thursday, Lukashenko reiterated his uncompromising line.
“I want to tell you like a man … people often reproach me: ‘He won’t give up power.’ They’re right to reproach me. The people didn’t elect me for this,” he said.
“Power is not given to be taken, thrown and given away,” he added, saying the country must not return to the chaos of the 1990s following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
In the month since the disputed election, nearly all the opposition’s key leaders have been arrested, fled or been forced to leave the country.
The only member of the seven-person presidium of the opposition’s coordination council to remain inside Belarus and at liberty is the writer Svetlana Alexievich, who won the 2015 Nobel prize for literature. On Wednesday she accused the authorities of terrorising their own people and said there had been unidentified men knocking at the door of her apartment. Diplomats from seven European countries came to her flat, in part to help protect her.
Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, retains the support of his key ally, Vladimir Putin. The pair are due to meet in Moscow next week for talks that are likely to prove crucial. The west has so far been cautious about taking firm action that might provoke a Russian intervention, although the EU is drawing up a list of Belarusian officials to target with sanctions.
Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor for the Guardian reports (Fri 11 Sep 2020):
Poland and Lithuania have urged the UK to take a lead in the political crisis in Belarus by urgently imposing sanctions against officials responsible for last month’s fraudulent presidential elections and demanding an international inquiry into the state’s repression.
Protests aimed at toppling autocratic leader have been led by women and show no sign of slowing
Shaun Walker in Moscow reports for the Observer (Sat 12 Sep 2020). He writes:
One evening last week, a stylised image of the Belarusian opposition leader, Maria Kolesnikova, was projected on to the wall of a Minsk apartment block.
Mocked up to look like the famous Soviet war poster The Motherland Calls, the image created by Anna Redko shows Kolesnikova heroically holding out a torn passport – a reference to her actions on the border with Ukraine on Tuesday when Alexander Lukashenko’s security services tried to deport her.
“She decided on a powerful gesture. That’s why she is one of the opposition’s leaders and I’m the press secretary,”Ivan Kravtsov, one of two others with Kolesnikova who did get deported, told journalists in Kyiv the next day.
Kolesnikova is now in a KGB prison in Minsk, and her determination not to be forced into exile was the latest impressive act of defiance in a revolutionary moment that has, from the beginning, been led and defined by women. On Saturday afternoon, women holding flowers and posters gathered in Minsk to protest – some were detained by masked men in green uniforms. The Saturday demonstrations have become a regular occurrence before the main Sunday protest in the city centre, where for the past four weekends, more than 100,000 people have assembled.
It was a female candidate who rallied support against Lukashenko before last month’s elections. The autocratic leader had jailed or exiled the men who wanted to stand against him, but thinking a woman could not pose a real challenge, he allowed the wife of one of his opponents, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, on to the ballot. Along with Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo, the wife of another candidate who fled Belarus after receiving threats, the three women travelled the country and won support for their simple message of facilitating political change.
Lukashenko’s misogynist rhetoric also served as a mobilising force. “The cynicism with which the current president expressed himself about them and their role, it insulted a lot of women,” said Kolesnikova in an interview at her campaign headquarters in central Minsk last month.
It was also women who provided the momentum for the protest movement’s rejuvenation after the horrific violence inflicted on demonstrators in the aftermath of Lukashenko declaring an implausible victory.
After three evenings of brutality from riot police, 250 women, dressed in white and holding flowers, stood defiantly on a roadside in central Minsk. Police left them untouched and the next day there were multiple rows of flower-waving women throughout the city.
In recent weeks, as most of its leaders have been forced out of Belarus, Kolesnikova has become the visible face of the movement, appearing fearless and cheerful despite the odds stacked against the protesters, regularly appearing at rallies until her kidnap-style arrest earlier this week.
Last month she said her role had been simply to show people that it was possible to demand political change. She said: “The west, Russia won’t help – we can only help ourselves. In this way it turned out that female faces became a signal for women, and men too, that every person should take responsibility.”
Following the protests on Sunday in Minsk, Belarus, Shaun Walker in Moscow, continues his reports, this time for the Guardian (Mon 14 Sep 2020), under the headline and subheading:
Belarusian president flies to Sochi for talks with Russian leader after month of protests
Shaun Walker writes:
The embattled Belarusian president, Alexander Lukashenko, held lengthy talks with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, on Monday, in a meeting seen as crucial to determining whether or not Lukashenko can survive a protest movement against him.
The pair met at Putin’s residence in Sochi, the first foreign trip Lukashenko has made since protests began a month ago.
“A friend is in trouble, and I say that sincerely,”Lukashenko told Putin in televised remarks at the start of the meeting, thanking him for his support. Putin at times seemed visibly bored during the conversation, tapping his hands and feet as Lukashenko embarked on a long monologue. Putin said Russia would offer a loan of $1.5bn to Belarus, which could help Lukashenko avoid an economic crisis in the short term.
There were few further details of whether the pair made any agreements behind closed doors, or what Lukashenko promised in return for the financial aid. Some believe Putin’s game may be to force a weakened Lukashenko to accept further integration between the two countries, essentially resulting in a form of soft annexation.
Russia and Belarus nominally form a “union state” that is meant to involve close integration under a number of common institutions but in reality only exists on paper, partly because in the past Lukashenko has been reluctant to cede power.
The visit came a day after Lukashenko’s riot police struggled to deal with another huge rally in Minsk and other cities, in which water cannon were used against protesters. On Monday morning, the country’s interior ministry said 774 people had been detained on Sunday, including more than 500 in Minsk.
The slogan for the protest on Sunday, with Lukashenko’s meeting with Putin in mind, was was: “We won’t let him sell the country.” Although the protests have not been geopolitical, and many people in Belarus are pro-Russian, there is increasing disquiet at the Kremlin’s support for Lukashenko.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who officially gained just 10% of the votes in last month’s presidential election but has declared herself “national leader” after she was forced into exile to neighbouring Lithuania, released a statement warning Putin that any agreements he made with Lukashenko would be deemed invalid. Tikhanovskaya has said she wants to preside over a transition period before new, free elections are held.
“I want to remind Vladimir Putin, whatever you agree on in Sochi will not have legal force,”Tikhanovskaya said on Monday. “Any agreements signed with the illegitimate Lukashenko will be revisited by the new government. Because the Belarusian people withdrew their trust and support for Lukashenko at the elections. I regret that you have decided on dialogue with a usurper, and not with the Belarusian people.”
Protests have been ongoing for more than a month, since Lukashenko declared victory in a presidential election on 9 August and then cracked down ruthlessly on protests in the aftermath.
In recent days, police have begun a renewed crackdown, and incidents caught on camera show that, for the first time, they have been willing to use violence against female protesters. Authorities have also targeted the leaders of the movement, particularly those involved in a coordination council set up to oversee a peaceful transition of power. Members have been arrested, threatened or deported.
Lukashenko has publicly asked Putin to intervene militarily in Belarus, painting the demonstrations as an arm of a Nato-led military assault on the country. Putin has declined to do so, but said he had prepared a contingent of law enforcement officers to send in if things got out of control. After the talks, Peskov said the two leaders had agreed this contingent would now be taken off high alert.
This week, Russia will send paratroopers to Belarus for 10 days of military exercises entitled “Slavic brotherhood”. Putin pointed out that there would be monthly military drills between Russian and Belarusian forces over the next year, but emphasised that the forces would not remain in Belarus after the drills.
Maria Kolesnikova could face up to five years in prison as president cracks down on opposition
Shaun Walker in Moscow reports today for the Guardian on the continued suppression of the legitimate opposition to the autocratic rule of Alexander Lukashenko and the recent rigged presidential election (Wed 16 Sep 2020). He writes:
Belarusian authorities have charged the opposition figure Maria Kolesnikova with “actions aimed at undermining national security”, a charge that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
The charge, announced by the country’s investigative committee, is the latest move in a crackdown on opposition leaders by the embattled president, Alexander Lukashenko, who has lost legitimacy among much of the population but retains the support of law enforcement agencies.
Kolesnikova thwarted an attempt by Lukashenko’s security agents to forcibly deport her last week by tearing up her passport on the border with Ukraine. She later said in a statement that security officials had told her she would be leaving the country “either alive or in bits”. She is currently in police custody.
Kolesnikova, 38, a flautist who has said she does not consider herself to be a politician, has become one of the highest-profile protest leaders in Belarus over the past month as Belarusians have rallied against Lukashenko’s continued rule. She was one of seven people on the board of a coordination council set up to transfer power away from Lukashenko. All except the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich have either been imprisoned or deported.
In a speech to top officials on Wednesday, Lukashenko said he had no plans to step down. “We had the vote and got the result,” he said. “It’s time to stop stirring up society.” He has promised to consider constitutional reform, but opposition politicians say this is likely to be mere window dressing.
Lukashenko on Wednesday accused the US of fomenting protests in the country, a claim that was echoed by the director of Russia’s foreign spy agency, Sergey Naryshkin. He said in a statement that his agency had information that the US had funded the Belarusian opposition and encouraged protests in the country.
At least for now, Lukashenko retains the support of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who appears to have decided that backing him is a better option than allowing pressure from the street to win out.
Lukashenko on Monday travelled to Putin’s Black Sea residence in Sochi for talks, and came away with expressions of support and a $1.5bn loan. On Wednesday, Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, was in Minsk, and Lukashenko said during their meeting that he had asked Putin for “several new types of weapon”. The claim was immediately denied by Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said the issue had not been raised at the meeting.
The German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, warned Putin that unconditional support for Lukashenko was likely to alienate the Belarusian people, who have close historical ties to Russia. Geopolitical themes have not been part of the protest movement.
Maas said: “With its unconditional support for Lukashenko so far and hybrid exertion of influence, Moscow will certainly lose the sympathy of people in Belarus.”
Ten days of Extinction Rebellion demonstrations in London ended with naked protests and an arrest over graffiti daubed on a statue of Winston Churchill.
At least 648 people have been arrested during the environmental action, including one man on Thursday on suspicion of causing criminal damage to the statue in Parliament Square.
Yellow graffiti was daubed on its plinth, including the words “is a racist”.
London mayor Sadiq Khan said: “This appalling vandalism is completely unacceptable. It will be fully investigated and the statue will be cleaned as quickly as possible.”
The Metropolitan police confirmed protesters had dispersed after 7pm, in line with conditions imposed on the event.
Earlier, a group of semi-naked protesters who chained themselves to railings surrounding parliament in a bid to expose what they called the “bare truth” about the climate crisis were arrested.
At least 13 topless women attached themselves to the outside of the Palace of Westminster, with bike locks around their necks.
They were part of a larger group from the XR campaign, which have used attention-grabbing techniques to highlight their concerns about the threats facing the planet.
The women wore masks with “4C” written on them, indicating fears of a large rise in global temperatures, and with words including drought, starvation and wildfires written on their chests to highlight the anticipated consequences of global warming.
Sarah Mintram, a teacher who took part in the action, said: “Now we’ve got your attention. By neglecting to communicate the consequences of a 4C-world – war, famine, drought, displacement – the government are failing to protect us.”
Officers removed the D-locks from their necks and took the women to police stations in four vans as supporters cheered them on.
Earlier home secretary Priti Patel had described the activists as “so-called eco-crusaders turned criminals”, and pledged to prevent “anarchy on our streets”.
Boris Johnson also criticised their “completely unacceptable” action in blockading print sites last Friday, affecting the delivery of papers including the Sun, Times, Daily Mail and Telegraph.
The demonizing of migrants, Extinction Rebellion protesters, and anyone who thinks that smoking causes cancer, and that therefore should have such a warning on cigarette packaging, is grist to some people's mill, as discussed in:
And, as for Sir Winston Churchill, and his statue in Parliament Square . . .
Back in June 2020 the graffitti on the base of the statue was black, part of the Black Lives Matter protest over the murder of George Floyd, the British Atlantic Slave Trade and the dubious wartime policy of Winston Churchill, that contributed to 1943 Bengal famine, and discussed in:
On this occasion, the grammar used in this "appalling vandalism" is incorrect, but the probability that history will concede the fact that Winston Churchill, like many Victorians and Edwardians born to Empire, was a racist, is a likely outcome.
Following the latest Extinction Rebellionprotest campaign, that ended on Thursday 10 September 2020, the Guardian's Matthew Taylor asks (Fri 11 Sep 2020):
A few minutes before Boris Johnson’s convoy swept past on his way to prime minister’s questions this week, around a dozen people stepped off the pavement and into the middle of the busy junction outside parliament.
As they hurriedly sat down and tried to glue their hands to the road, they were surrounded by scores of police officers. Within seconds they were lifted – or dragged – back to the pavement. The protest was over almost before it had begun and minutes later the prime minister’s motorcade sped past unhindered.
The action was one of scores of Extinction Rebellion non-violent civil disobedience protests – from a migrant justice demonstration outside the Home Office to blockading a slaughterhouse in Manchester – that have been taking place in major cities across the UK over the past two weeks to try to highlight the escalating climate crisis.
Unlike XR’s previous rebellions in April and October last year, which saw thousands of people blockade large parts of central London day after day, protesters have focused on what they say are some of the the key actors driving the climate crisis – from the UK government to rightwing thinktanks and media companies, fossil fuel corporations to big infrastructure projects.
Numbers on the streets have been smaller – mainly because of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic – and the more targeted actions have caused neither the same level of disruption or gripped the public imagination to the same extent as they did last year.
However, XR organisers say its more focused campaign has given the movement a renewed sense of purpose.
“In the past we have raised a very generalised alarm which needed doing,” said Clare Farrell of XR. “But there are things that are structurally important to understand about the causal reality of this crisis and I think we have done a fantastic job of drawing attention to them.”
‘Free the truth’
A key target of the protests was rightwing thinktanks and lobbying organisations that campaigners say play a crucial role in downplaying the climate crisis. Last week, XR activists joined novelists, poets and playwrights, including Mark Rylance and Zadie Smith, to demonstrate outside 55 Tufton Street in London, a venue infamous for hosting meetings of thinktanks and lobbying outfits linked to climate science denial and the oil industry.
A few days later, XR upped the ante, using trucks and bamboo scaffolds to block roads outside the printing presses of a raft of national newspapers – including the Sun, Times, Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday – with banners reading “Free The Truth” and “5 Crooks Control Our News”.
The action not only blocked the printing presses of those newspapers, it also had a knock on effect of the distribution of other titles, including the Guardian. For the first time since the protests began, XR was high up the news agenda and once again the subject of heated public debate. The nature and target of the protests drew stinging criticism, with the prime minister and home secretary Priti Patel accusing XR of undermining democracy and a free press, and branding the group “criminals” and a threat to the British way of life. In anonymous briefings the government even floated the idea of classing XR as an “organised crime group”.
And it was not just the Conservative party who criticised the action. Labour leader Keir Starmer said the blockade was “an attack on the cornerstone of democracy” and the newspapers themselves, as well as media commentators and the Society of Editors, have since lined up to denounce the group.
But for XR – and many in the wider environment movement – the action was deemed legitimate and necessary. They argued that much of the rightwing press, owned by a handful of billionaires, have played a key role in downplaying the climate crisis and undermining the structural changes needed to address it – that much of our press, in fact, is far from free.
Angus Satow, co-founder of the leftwing grassroots environmental group Labour for a Green New Deal, told the Guardian: “We desperately need groups like XR to highlight the political and economic actors that are driving this climate crisis. Many of the big ideas that were being discussed in relation to the climate crisis when the coronavirus hit seem to have been forgotten by politicians who are scrabbling to get us back to a normal that will be disastrous.
“We need groups like XR and the school strike movement to keep the pressure on and drive the climate crisis up the agenda.”
Zoë Blackler, a journalist working in XR’s media team, said that despite the backlash from the establishment, the protest at the print works had been “really galvanising across the movement”.
She said that although it had brought a huge amount of negative media coverage – with journalists trawling through the private lives of those involved, contacting former members for information on the group and approaching funders to disown them – she hoped it had also opened up a space for important conversations about the climate crisis and media ownership.
“I can imagine there are conversations going on in newsrooms now about how they cover the climate and ecological crisis ... I hope when things have settled down this will lead to real progress in the quality of the reporting.”
Environmental justice
A criticism of XR ahead of its latest rebellion, especially from black and ethnic minority groups, was that its tactic of encouraging mass arrests ignored the reality of police racism, and effectively made the protests the preserve of privileged white people.
The September protests aimed to be different, with XR working more closely with other groups and recognising the connections between structural racism, inequality and the climate crisis.
Daze Aghaji, who has been involved with XR since the beginning of last year, said the last two weeks had been the most diverse rebellion so far.
“There is still loads of work to do on this but we are learning … we are having good conversations with other groups, listening and making sure we are much better at making sure everyone knows they are welcomed.”
Black environmental activists outside of XR say the movement was making some progress but urged the media to highlight the work of other grassroots groups who are focusing on climate and racial justice.
As XR wound up its latest rebellion on Thursday, it was already preparing its next campaign. According to those involved it will take the form of a “Money Strike” – with people encouraged to withhold debt or taxes from institutions deemed to be fuelling not only the climate crisis but also structural racism and wider inequality.
Launched less than two years ago, the group is still thinking big. Its actions over the past two weeks did not capture the public imagination in the way it had done in April last year. By attacking the rightwing media, they have made a formidable enemy – and according to some critics, may have distracted the press and the public from their core message about the climate crisis.
But as evidence of the climate and ecological emergency mounts – from melting glaciers in the Antarctic to wildfires in California and the widespread destruction of wildlife and the natural world – XR still believes it has a crucial role to play.
As Boris Johnson stood up in parliament for PMQs on Wednesday, 92-year-old Arnold Pease, from Manchester, was being arrested outside for his part in the protests.
As he was being led away by police, Pease said:“We’re here to continue holding them to account. They call 92-year-old great grandparents ‘organised criminals’ for doing what’s necessary to protect their grand kids? The government’s criminal inaction on the greatest existential threat we’ve ever faced is the real story.”
XR identifying certain rightwing climate denial thinktanks, and climate denial in rightwing media, is getting too close to home for some, whose function is to serve vested interests . . .
The long read in The Guardian Journal (Fri 29 Nov 2019) explains:
In the wake of the Brexit vote, ultra free market thinktanks have gained exceptional access to the heart of Boris Johnson’s government.
By Felicity Lawrence, Rob Evans, David Pegg, Caelainn Barr and Pamela Duncan.
One of the salient points made in this long read is how:
In the period immediately before the Brexit referendum and in the years since, a stream of prominent British politicians and campaigners, including Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, have flown to the US to meet with thinktanks such as the AEI and the Heritage Foundation, often at the expense of those thinktanks, seeking out ideas, support and networking opportunities. Meanwhile, US thinktanks and their affiliates, which are largely funded by rightwing American billionaires and corporate donations, have teamed up with British politicians and London-based counterparts such as the IEA, the Legatum Institute and the Initiative for Free Trade, to help write detailed proposals for what the UK’s departure from the EU, and its future relationships with both the EU and the US, should look like, raising questions about foreign influence on British politics.
The organisations involved in this collaboration between the US and UK radical right are partners in a global coalition of more than 450 thinktanks and campaign groups called the Atlas Network, which has its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. Members of the network operate independently but also cooperate closely in fighting for their shared vision of ultra free markets and limited government. They call themselves the “worldwide freedom movement”, collectively they have multimillion-dollar budgets, and many of their donors, board members, trustees and researchers overlap.
After the referendum, . . .
. . . thinktanks in the US and UK seized the crisis moment. Two UK Atlas partners, the IEA and the Legatum Institute, gained exceptional access to ministers as they advocated for a hard break from the EU and provided constant briefings to the radical Brexiter MPs in the European Research Group (ERG). “They had lots of meetings with ministers because politicians like people promising simple answers, but often those answers were not there,”Raoul Ruparel, a former special adviser to Theresa May on Europe, told us.
British voters, and even some MPs, are barely aware of the deep influence of these thinktanks, yet with help from members of this network, a once politically impossible kind of Brexit became inevitable. “It seemed almost faith-based,” a senior Whitehall source said, “[the idea that] … if only the UK would do a free trade agreement with the US, opening up almost unilaterally, it would be the equivalent of doing one with the whole world – prices would drop, we’d all be better off.” He added: “It was staggering, really. Not even Margaret Thatcher or monetarism at its height had contemplated such shock therapy.”
In October 2019 David Pegg and Rob Evans reported on:
It’s good entertainment, but that’s all it is. Seeing Boris Johnson ritually dismembered in parliament might make us feel better, but nothing changes. He still has an 80-seat majority, though less than 30% of the electorate voted for the Conservatives. We are reduced, for five long years, to spectators.
Our system allows the victorious government a mandate to do what it likes between elections, without further reference to the people. As we have seen, this can include breaking international law, suspending parliament, curtailing the judiciary, politicising the civil service, attacking the Electoral Commission and invoking royal prerogative powers to make policy without anyone’s consent. This is not democracy, but a parody of democracy.
By contrast to our five-yearly vote, capital can respond to government policy every second, withdrawing its consent with catastrophic consequences if it doesn’t like its drift. There’s a massive imbalance of power here. The voting power of capital, with modern trading technologies, has advanced by leaps and bounds. Electoral power is trapped in the age of the quill pen.
The problem, in other words, is not just Johnson. The problem is the UK’s political system, which presents an open invitation for autocratic behaviour. In the past, people warned that a ruthless operator could make hay with this system. Well, that moment has come.
Labour has long been part of the problem, refusing to contemplate even a change to our preposterous first-past-the-post elections, let alone any wider surrender of power. And it is tragic to watch it now, still playing by the old rules. These state that a party should not show its hand until a few months before the election. That’s four years away, and the power grab is happening now. We urgently need a stirring alternative vision, a call to democratic arms. Instead, we get forensic dissections of particular government policies: admirably done, but unmatched to the moment.
At moments like this, old parties flounder. New ideas arise outside the system, and effective opposition takes place on the street. Of course, this is difficult now, as there are good public health reasons not to gather in large numbers, and we can expect the government to exploit them. But civil disobedience is ever-inventive, constantly developing new tactics in response to attempts to shut it down.
We saw some of these in Extinction Rebellion’s latest week of protests, and we saw something else too: its emergence as a broad oppositional movement, taking on the billionaire press, the lobbyists, the banks and other bastions of power, that are not usually associated with the extinction and climate crises, but are fundamental to them. From the beginning, XR has been both an environmental movement and a democracy movement: participatory politics, in the form of citizens’ assemblies, has been one of its key demands.
Like the suffragettes and the civil rights movement, it was excoriated for threatening “our way of life”. Almost all democratic advances, everywhere, have been secured by people who were branded “anarchists” and “criminals”.
The democratic and environmental crises have the same roots: our exclusion, for several years at a time, from meaningful politics. In some places, particularly Ireland, Iceland, France, Taiwan, British Columbia, Ontario and several Spanish and Brazilian cities, a host of fascinating experiments with new democratic forms has been taking place: constitutional conventions, citizens’ assemblies, community development, digital deliberation and participatory budgeting. They are designed to give people a voice between elections, tempering representative democracy, allowing them to refine their choices.
The UK pays lip service to these innovations. Last week the citizens’ assembly on climate, convened by parliament, published its findings, which included suggestions such as taxing frequent fliers, getting rid of SUVs and eating less red meat. But there are no obvious means by which they can be adopted by the government. In Scotland, all local authorities allow residents to set part of their budgets, though so far, it’s very small: just 1% of the money allocated by central government.
Unless the results of participatory democracy can be translated into policy, and unless it operates at a meaningful scale, it generates cynicism and disillusion. But as the processes in Ireland, Madrid and in some Brazilian cities have shown, when people are allowed to make big and frequent decisions, the results can be transformative. Alienated, polarised populations come together to identify and solve their common problems. Democracy becomes a lived reality.
Nowhere has participatory politics yet been allowed to fulfil its promise. There is no principled or technical reason why the majority of a municipal or national budget should not be set through public deliberation, following techniques pioneered in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. There is no principled or technical reason why the monthly voting process for improving life in Reykjavik could not be applied at the national level, everywhere. The call for full-scale participatory democracy is as revolutionary as the call for the universal franchise was in the 19th century. What is needed is a vehicle similar in scale to the Chartist and suffragette movements.
There are precedents for environmental protests mutating into democratic revolutions: this is what helped precipitate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our climate and extinction crises expose the failures of all quasi-democratic systems, and the blatant capture of ours by the power of money turns the UK into a global crucible.
In XR’s outrageous, reviled protests we see the beginnings of what could become a 21st-century democratic revolution. Through his incompetence, callousness and greed for power, Johnson has done us two favours: exposing the shallowness of our theatrical democracy, and creating a potential coalition ranging from hospital porters to supreme court judges. Now we must decide how to mobilise it.
Stewart Lee in the new review supplement to the Observer 13/09/20, writes an excoriating Opinion piece on Boris Johnson, that in the print edition runs under a question that forms the headline:
"I needed Will’s advice. The environmental action group Extinction Rebellion was asking minor celebrities, like me, to sign a letter in Sunday’s Observer countering the Boris Johnson government’s claims it was a criminal organisation, after it stopped the distribution of newspapers deemed hostile to its aims from Rupert Murdoch’s plants. I was interested in William’s position. “Well, Extinction Rebellion is of course right to be extremely alarmed,” he said, “but I suppose, philosophically, it might be worth your clarifying the distinction between a criminal action and a moral one.” William allowed me to answer him in one long stream-of-consciousness rant, a skill honed through 30 years of echo-chamber leftwing standup."
Blaming and shaming?
The discourse leads, quite logically to issues of power and accountability, and the systems of government in the so-called democracies. The tyranny of the majority is a dangerous state of affairs if the majority are wrong. And, a question remains as to the validity of all electoral constituencies, especially when the nation state operates in narrow nationalist interests. All national constituencies are minorities, and some of the minorities wield more power, and harm, than others. Never before is it more important that democracy should attempt to operate in an international, or pan-national way. Hence the validity of the United Nations sponsored process of securing agreements across the world to address the climate emergency. It is the capitalist vested interests who are strategically amplifying the calls for national sovereignty and governance, because, as with all colonial and imperial methods, "divide and rule" as a policy is highly functional.
Arwa Mahdawi, in this Opinion piece, identifies the actions of big business to shift the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals, as encapsulated in the idea of the;
“carbon footprint”
Arwa Mahdawi's Opinion piece in G2 Guardian supplement (Tue 15 Sep 2020) runs under the headline:
The Guardian website runs the piece under the headline and subheading:
Most plastic will never be recycled – and the manufacturers couldn’t care less
Oil and gas companies make far more money churning out new plastic than reusing old. Meanwhile, the public gets the blame
Plastic recycling is a scam. You diligently sort your rubbish, you dutifully wash your plastic containers, then everything gets tossed in a landfill or thrown in the ocean anyway. OK, maybe not everything – but the vast majority of it. According to one analysis, only 9% of all plastic ever made has likely been recycled. Here’s the kicker: the companies making all that plastic have spent millions on advertising campaigns lecturing us about recycling while knowing full well that most plastic will never be recycled.
A new investigation by National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) reports that the large oil and gas companies that manufacture plastics have known for decades that recycling plastic was unlikely to ever happen on a broad scale because of the high costs involved. “They were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,”Larry Thomas, former president of one of the plastic industry’s most powerful trade groups, told NPR. There is a lot more money to be made in selling new plastic than reusing the old stuff. But, in order to keep selling new plastic, the industry had to clean up its wasteful image. “If the public thinks that recycling is working, then they are not going to be as concerned about the environment,”Thomas noted. And so a huge amount of resources were diverted into intricate “sustainability theatre”.
Multinationals misleading people for profit? Hold the front page! While the plastics industry’s greenwashing will come as no surprise to anyone, the extent of the deception alleged in NPR’s investigation is truly shocking. (I should state for the record that an industry representative interviewed by NPR contested the idea that the public was intentionally misled, although he does “understand the scepticism”.)
The subterfuge around recycling plastic is also an important reminder of just how cynically and successfully big companies have shifted the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals. This might be best encapsulated in a famous ad campaign that aired in the US during the 1970s with the slogan “People Start Pollution. People can stop it.”
The campaign was created by a non-profit group called Keep America Beautiful, which happened to be heavily funded by beverage and packaging companies with a vested interest in convincing people that they were the ones to blame for a polluted planet, not capitalism.
Perhaps one of the most effective bits of propaganda that big business has come up with to shift the burden of combating the climate crisis on to individuals is the idea of the “carbon footprint”.
BP popularised the term in the early noughties, in what has been called one of the most “successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever”.
While oil companies were telling us to fret about our carbon usage they were doing whatever the hell they liked: 20 fossil fuel companies can be directly linked to more than one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions, an analysis by leading climate researchers found last year.
Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell are behind more than 10% of the world’s climate emissions since 1965 – but we have been successfully convinced that people start pollution and people can stop it. That if we just fly less and recycle more the planet will be OK. To some degree that is right: there must be a level of personal responsibility when it comes to the climate emergency. We all have to do our part. But individual action is a tiny drop in a heavily polluted ocean; we need systemic change to make a real difference. And, more than anything, we need to change what we value. What frustrates me most about BP’s“carbon footprint” propaganda is how clever it is. There is so much human ingenuity in the world, but it is all directed towards the wrong things.
Q. Who can blame those who blame the polluters who actively deceive and displace concepts of accountability?
A. Re:LODE Radio, does not!
Having bamboozled the consumer into taking responsibility for each individual's "carbon footprint", BP is shifting its future investments portfolio from the classic profile of "oil major" to a type of "energy company".
Jillian Ambrose reports for the Guardian (Thu 10 Sep 2020), in the Financial section, on how BP looking for new ways to make a profit, under the headline and subheading:
BP takes $1.1bn stake in offshore wind farms as it agrees Equinor deal
Strategic partnership will seek to develop more wind farms off the coast of the US
Jillian Ambrosewrites:
BP has taken its first major step into the offshore wind industry with the purchase of a $1.1bn (£850m) stake in two US offshore wind projects being developed by Norwegian state oil company Equinor.
The oil companies will also team up to develop more windfarms off the coast of the US after agreeing a strategic partnership to help corner the fast-growing market for offshore wind.
Bernard Looney, BP’s chief executive, described the deal as “an important early step” in the delivery of BP’s new climate ambitions, which include a goal to develop 50GW of renewable energy by 2030.
“It will play a vital role in allowing us to deliver our aim of rapidly scaling up our renewable energy capacity, and in doing so help deliver the energy the world wants and needs,” he said.
BP’s move into the offshore wind industry, which is currently growing at about 20% a year, has emerged after the oil company unveiled new plans to shift away from fossil fuels and towards low carbon energy within the next decade.
The company set out plans last month to grow its low-carbon investments eightfold by 2025, and tenfold by 2030, while cutting its fossil fuel output by 40% from 2019 levels. It plans to give further details on how it plans to make the shift from “oil major” to “energy company” in a series of investor presentations scheduled for early next week.
Equinor, formerly known as Statoil, began its own shift towards cleaner energy sources around a decade ago by beginning to develop offshore wind projects. It is currently developing the Dogger Bank project off the Yorkshire coast alongside SSE which will be the largest windfarm in the world once it begins generating power in 2023.
Equinor expects to accelerate its existing goal to grow its renewable energy portfolio to between 4 to 6GW by 2026 and 12GW to 16GW by 2035.
Eldar Sætre, the company’s chief executive, said the new partnership “underlines both companies’ strong commitment to accelerate the energy transition”, and will use their combined skills to “grow a profitable offshore wind business together in the US”.
The partnership will lean on BP’s experience as a major energy trader and Equinor’s track-record in developing offshore wind projects.
Under the deal, BP will take a 50% stake in Equinor’s Beacon windfarm which is in an early stage of development off the Nantucket coast, and in the Empire windfarm off the coast of Long Island which is due to begin generating clean electricity by the mid-2020s. The windfarms are expected to generate enough electricity to power over 2m US homes.
Anyway . . .
. . . Oil will be replaced by clean electricity, BP predicts, as demand may never recover from Covid-19 pandemic
Jillian Ambrose covers this story for the Guardian Mon 14 Sep 2020). She writes:
BP has called time on the world’s rising demand for fossil fuels after finding that demand for oil may have already reached its peak and faces an unprecedented decades-long decline.
Demand for oil may never fully recover from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the oil firm, and may begin falling in absolute terms for the first time in modern history.
BP’s influential annual report on the future of energy, published on Monday, says oil will be replaced by clean electricity from windfarms, solar panels and hydropower plants as renewable energy emerges as the fastest-growing energy source on record.
Spencer Dale, BP’s chief economist, said the company’s vision of the world’s energy future had become greener due to a combination of the Covid-19 pandemic and the quickening pace of climate action, which has hastened “peak oil”.
The report in effect sounds a death-knell for the growth of global oil demand after two of the report’s three energy scenarios for the next 30 years found that demand reached a peak in 2019.
In BP’s third scenario, showing a world in which climate action does not accelerate, oil demand plateaus at similar levels seen in 2019 through the 2020s before declining from 2035.
The report has confirmed a chorus of warnings from independent energy economists that the impact of coronavirus will bring forward the start of the oil industry’s terminal decline from the end of the decade.
BP’s chief executive, Bernard Looney, said the findings would help the company to “better understand the changing energy landscape” and would be instrumental in helping it develop its plans to become a net zero energy company by 2050.
He admitted earlier this year that he would “not write off” the possibility that coronavirus had brought forward the global peak in oil demand, and was “more convinced than ever”BP must embrace a low-carbon future.
The report’s central scenario, which aligns with the goals of the Paris climate agreement to keep global temperatures well below 2C above pre-industrialised levels, shows demand for oil tumbling by 55% over the next 30 years. Meanwhile, the report’s greenest scenario, in which the world aims to limit global heating to an increase of 1.5C, oil demand falls 80% by 2050.
The energy transition could be even quicker if global governments choose to spur a green economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis. A boom in economic stimulus packages for low-carbon industries, which is expected by many energy experts, was not taken into account in the report because this outcome is “not inevitable”, according to Dale.
He will present BP’s energy vision to the company’s investors on Monday as part of a three-day event outlining the company’s plan to become a carbon neutral energy company by 2050, which is one of the most ambitious energy transition plans set out by any large oil company.
BP announced plans last month to grow its low-carbon investments eightfold by 2025 and tenfold by 2030, while cutting its fossil-fuel output by 40% from 2019. The company took its first step into the offshore wind industry last week with a $1.1bn (£860m) deal to buy a stake in two projects owned by Equinor of Norway.
The world’s greater reliance on clean energy means renewables could grow from 5% of the world’s energy use today to somewhere between 20% and 60% by 2050, according to the report.
“In all three of these scenarios the share of renewable energy grows more quickly than any energy fuel ever seen in history,”Dale said.
He explained that the coronavirus pandemic was expected to stall economic growth in developing countries that typically spur energy demand, while economically developed countries are putting in place more ambitious climate policies and raising carbon taxes, according to the report.
The shift towards electric vehicles will also take its toll on demand for oil. In all three scenarios the report found that the use of oil in transport would reach a peak in the mid- to late 2020s due to the shift towards electric cars and hydrogen-powered vehicles.
Another factor dragging on the forecasts for oil demand in the coming decades are new measures to limit the production of plastic, which is manufactured using petrochemicals produced from fossil fuels, through more recycling and less single-use plastics.
The effect may be an upending of global energy market dynamics, according to BP. The report expects members of the Opec oil cartel, led by Saudi Arabia, to bear the brunt of the decline in demand while US shale rigs take a greater share of the global oil market over the next decade. It may also usher in an era of more diversity in energy where no one source dominates the energy landscape, and all are forced to compete to maintain a significant share of the market.
A capitalist industry par excellence, mining and extraction, was made accountable for cultural vandalism this week, but not before time . . .
Here’s a rule of thumb for boards in a crisis: if your company’s reputation is still being shredded three weeks after you tried to put a lid on events, you probably got your response wrong.
Rio Tinto’s board did. Having confessed in an internal report that “systemic failures” lay behind the blowing up of two 46,000-year-old Indigenous Australians rock shelters in western Australia in May, the non-executive chairman, Simon Thompson, proceeded to argue that nobody at the mining group should have to resign.
Instead, three executives deemed to carry “partial responsibility” for the appalling error suffered a trim in their pay pockets. A collective £4m penalty was, presumably, intended to wow the outside world, but the numbers were never likely to have that effect. Jean-Sébastien Jacques, the chief executive, was docked £2.7m in bonuses, a tolerable inconvenience when you’ve been paid £17m in the past four years.
In any case, rather than bonus deductions, many Australians wanted to see proper accountability. Jacques admitted he hadn’t read the report that warned of the shelters’ significance until it was too late, so one “systemic failure” was corporate incompetence in not booting a critical document up the chain of command. On the other hand, shouldn’t a competent boss install strong reporting systems?
The same internal report rather suggested so: “As chief executive, Jean-Sébastien Jacques is ultimately responsible for the group’s cultural heritage management,” it said.
The result is a fine mess. Hostile headlines and questions in the Australian parliament have kept coming. Many investors – and not just the “socially responsible” contingent – feel a top 10 FTSE 100 company should have responded more forcefully.
Rio stands somewhere between laughing stock in Australia (the former prime minister Kevin Rudd refers to “Rio TNT”) and target of outright hostility. Both are problems when your core division requires land rights to dig up chunks of the Pilbara desert for its iron ore.
The board will meet to rethink. That doesn’t sound good for Jacques’ hopes of surviving. Mind you, Thompson should also ask himself if he’s the right chairman.
Hesta super says 'change in ranks' at Rio Tinto won't be enough as Juukan Gorge fallout continues
So, runs the headline for a story by Lorena Allam, Ben Butler and Calla Wahlquist on the concerns of Hesta, which manages
$52bn on behalf of more than 870,000 Australians, and has written to the Rio
Tinto board before its meeting, due to go ahead on Thursday in London.
Shockwaves from blasting of ancient Aboriginal sacred site spreads across Pilbara mining industry.
Fallout from Rio Tinto’s blasting of a 46,000-year-old sacred site in Western Australia has spread across the Pilbara mining industry, as shareholders call for companies to make public their dealings with traditional owners and demand an immediate halt to any operations that could damage existing sites.
One of Australia’s biggest superannuation funds wants a public inquiry into all agreements Rio Tinto has made with Aboriginal traditional owners in the iron ore-rich Pilbara, saying: “A change in the ranks of Rio’s senior leadership won’t mitigate this risk for investors.”
Hesta, which manages $52bn on behalf of more than 870,000 Australians, has written to the Rio Tinto board before its meeting, due to go ahead on Thursday in London. Rio’s chief executive, Jean-Sébastien Jaques, has been widely tipped to be removed from his post over the matter.
Hesta warned that reputational risks from the actions of mining companies could impact their value.
“Mining companies that fail to negotiate fairly and in good faith with traditional owners expose the company to reputational and legal risk,”Hesta’s statement said.
“These risks increase the longer these agreements are in place. Without an independent review, we cannot adequately assess these risks and understand how they may impact value. We have lost confidence that the company can do this on their own.”
The super fund wants a review of all current agreements Rio has negotiated with traditional owners in light of revelations that they contain gag orders preventing traditional owners from speaking about their concerns for sacred and significant sites.
Hesta said it had sought advice from the economist and lawyer Prof Allan Fels as an appropriate expert to consider the matter.
Fels told Guardian Australia: “There are potential unconscionable conduct issues, both at the legal and ethical level. They need to be investigated independently.”
He said this included the use of confidentiality clauses. “Someone needs to look behind the confidentiality elements,” he said.
An investigation by Guardian Australia found that more than 100 ancient Aboriginal sites in Western Australia could still be destroyed by mining companies, which have obtained legal permission to do so.
The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility (ACCR) wants Fortescue Metals Group to halt mining activities that would disturb, destroy or desecrate cultural heritage sites in Australia until relevant laws are strengthened, and to lift any confidentiality provisions on Aboriginal traditional owners so they can speak freely and publicly about cultural heritage or other concerns on their land.
“As investors, we believe it’s necessary that this shareholder resolution receives strong support – or is proactively adopted by FMG’s board – because there is far too much at stake to allow any further destruction of Indigenous cultural sites, as [the federal MP Warren] Entsch has also made clear,” said the ACCR’sBrynn O’Brien.
“In engagement with us, FMG has been clear that it is happy for business to continue as usual. Shareholders, in the wake of Juukan Gorge, know that business as usual is absolutely unacceptable.
“FMG has a dubious history of engagement with Pilbara native title holders, specifically the Yindjibarndi people. Comments as recently as last year, coming from the chairman saying ‘that is not a community I’m going to empower with tens of millions of your cash’ demonstrate that the company and board have a long way to go in understanding and valuing the intricacies of cultural heritage and the agency of traditional owners.”
The ACCR has also sought similar assurances from BHP.
FMG said it does not have heritage “gag order” clauses in its agreements with traditional owners and does not support a moratorium on mining activity.
“The moratorium, proposed by people unfamiliar with the West Australian mining industry, is not supported by Fortescue as it would disempower local Aboriginal people in the Pilbara and limit the positive contribution the mining industry is making to the state and national economies, at a time when it is needed most,” chief executive Elizabeth Gaines said.
Hesta said only a broader review of current practices and agreements with traditional owners “will provide certainty to investors that these risks are properly managed by Australia’s mining industry with fair outcomes for all”.
“The larger, systemic issue of how the company and the mining sector negotiates agreements with Traditional Owners needs to be urgently addressed,” it said.
Hesta joins several major institutional investors who have criticised Rio Tinto about its conduct surrounding the destruction of Juukan gorge.
In May the company blew up a 46,000-year-old significant site against the wishes of traditional owners to access higher grade iron ore. The act triggered international condemnation and prompted a federal parliamentary inquiry.
The inquiry, which has had to postpone a planned visit to Western Australia because of difficulties associated with interstate travel and the state government’s recent changes to quarantine restrictions, is continuing.
The inquiry chair, Warren Entsch, said there would be a series of remote access public hearings but members still wanted to visit WA as soon as possible.
“It is vital to see the destruction first hand and share the experience and the consequences of this policy failure with the traditional owners,”Entsch said. “It is vital that we hear directly from those most affected, the traditional owners of this country, and that can only be done in a meaningful way on country.”
Entsch repeated his call for a moratorium on all mining activity which could cause irreversible damage to heritage sites.
“No government and no company wants another Juukan Gorge on its conscience,” the LNP MP said. “If nothing else, the ongoing damage to Rio Tinto’s reputation should give pause for thought for all concerned.”
Ben Butler, Lorena Allam and Calla Wahlquist for the Guardian, report on the fallout of a debacle that has resulted in multiple resignations of senior executives of Rio Tinto, including the CEO (Fri 11 Sep 2020). The headline and subheading run:
In a statement to Australian Stock Exchange the company confirms move that follows the blowing up of 46,000-year-old caves in Western Australia
The Rio Tinto chief executive, Jean-Sébastien Jacques, and two other senior executives are leaving the global miner after its board bowed to intense investor pressure for strong action over its decision to blow up 46,000-year-old rock shelters at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.
Rio Tinto said Jacques was leaving “by mutual agreement” with the board.
The iron ore head, Chris Salisbury, and the corporate affairs boss, Simone Niven, will also depart, the company said on Friday morning.
The move came after a week in which investors queued up to denounce as inadequate the board’s previous decision to cut the executives’ short-term bonuses in response to the scandal and the head of an Australian parliamentary committee looking into the affair raised concerns that the company had given the inquiry misleading evidence.
Despite leaving the company all three would continue to be entitled to long-term bonuses, Rio Tinto said.
The company blew up the rock shelters, which were highly significant to the area’s Aboriginal traditional owners, the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people, in May, so that it could mine better quality iron ore, despite knowing for years of their importance.
In response to an outcry from Indigenous groups and investors, Rio Tinto’s board conducted a review of the decision, which led to the reduction in bonuses.
“While there is general recognition of the transparency of the board review and support for the changes recommended, significant stakeholders have expressed concerns about executive accountability for the failings identified,” the company said.
Investors have welcomed the decision. Ian Silk, the chief executive of Australia’s biggest superannuation fund, AustralianSuper, said he was “satisfied that appropriate responsibility has now been taken by executives at Rio Tinto”.
“Rio can now work with traditional owners to guarantee that its processes are appropriate for the protection of culturally important sites and that it has the right internal accountabilities,” he said.
Image released by the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation shows Juukan Gorge in Western Australia – one of the earliest known sites occupied by Aboriginal people in Australia.
The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility welcomed an end to the “malaise of Rio Tinto’s board and senior management”, James Fitzgerald said. “Shareholder democracy and investor action is alive and well in Australia.”
The National Native Title Council welcomed Rio’s actions but said the company must make “structural change” to make sure a disaster like Juukan didn’t happen again.
“There is more work to be done,” said the NNTC’s chief executive, Jamie Lowe. “The law needs to be strengthened. We can’t rely on the goodwill of mining companies, we need the law strengthened. We can’t rely on their word that things will get better.”
The Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, which advises 38 large super funds on governance issues, welcomed the departures but said the process had been “drawn out”.
“Rio Tinto now has the opportunity to address the necessary remediation, cultural heritage and risk processes with fresh eyes,” said ACSI’s chief executive, Louise Davidson.
“Rio Tinto must prioritise working with traditional owners the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people to rebuild their relationship. It is critical that this is not delayed.”
In a move that recognised that the board has lacked engagement with Australian issues, the company will also promote from non-executive director to senior independent director the executive responsible for oversight of its Australian-listed arm, Rio Tinto Limited.
Sam Laidlaw will continue as senior independent director responsible for the British half of the group, Rio Tinto plc.
Davidson said ACSI was pleased to see Rio Tinto’s board recognise it needed to be more connected to Australia. “This work will be ongoing and must be a feature of future appointments to the board.
“We will also be looking closely at the separation arrangements, with the expectation that any exit won’t provide a windfall for executives on their departure.”
Rio Tinto’s chairman, Simon Thompson, said: “What happened at Juukan was wrong and we are determined to ensure that the destruction of a heritage site of such exceptional archaeological and cultural significance never occurs again at a Rio Tinto operation.
“We are also determined to regain the trust of the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura people and other traditional owners.
“We have listened to our stakeholders’ concerns that a lack of individual accountability undermines the group’s ability to rebuild that trust and to move forward to implement the changes identified in the board review.”
Jacques will remain in his role until a successor is found or 31 March next year, whichever is earlier. Salisbury and Niven stepped down from their positions on Friday and will leave the company on 31 December.
Nearly a month ago (Wed 19 Aug 2020), this story by Lorena Allam of the Guardian, draws our attention to the impact upon the life and culture of Indigenous People, and their heritage, as a result of the extraction of mineral wealth from their lands in the Pilbara, in a process of accumulation of wealth and capital at the expense of others, through dispossession.
The Pilbara region of Western Australia is crossed by the LODE Zone Line
BHP iron ore train arriving from the BHP Pilbara mining operation at Port Hedland for shipment to China
The LODE Cargo of Questions includes the Video and Information Wrap for Port Hedland, a port that serves the Pilbara region as the most important part of the vast hinterland of Western Australia.
Lorena Allam writes under the headline and subheading:
A Senate inquiry has heard statements from Indigenous elders who risk losing up to 86 significant sites to the mining giant’s operations
The Banjima people in the Pilbara, who could lose up to 86 significant sites to BHP’sSouth Flank iron ore mine expansion, have told a Senate inquiry that traditional owners have had no choice but to “trade away their heritage” to mining interests.
The Banjima said they had made a significant contribution to the prosperity of the nation and “decades of uninterrupted economic growth for Australians” which should be better recognised and respected.
“The engine room of the Australian resources industry” is located on and around their lands, the senior Martidja Banyjima elder, Maitland Parker, said.
“As such, the Banjima people have made a significant and generational contribution to the prosperity of this nation,”Parker, who is chairman of the Banjima native title corporation, said.
“It is time that the role of traditional owner groups as valuable partners to the resource industry is more widely acknowledged and appreciated.”
The Banjima have seven mines, 300km of railway line and hundreds of exploration tenements on their land, operated by BHP, Rio Tinto and Hancock. Their relationship with mining companies has been “long and sometimes difficult”.
“The cumulative destruction of our country is something which sits uneasily with our people,”Parker said.
BHP have Western Australia’s government approval to destroy more than 40 – and possibly as many as 86 – significant Banjima sites in the central Pilbara.
BHP’s own reports identified sites of art, artefacts and rock shelters that were occupied between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, while the broader area showed occupation “has been ongoing for approximately 40,000 years”. The company has been aware since at least 2019 that the Banjima do not want any of the sites disturbed.
But under section 18 of the WA Aboriginal Heritage Act, the Banjima people cannot object, and they cannot raise concerns publicly, having signed comprehensive agreements with BHP.
The Banjima were critical of such claim-wide agreements, which they say are common in the Pilbara and were “negotiated in the context of an imbalance of power”.
“A major global mining corporation negotiating with traditional owner groups is not usually conducive to an agreement in which Aboriginal culture and heritage are protected consistent with cultural obligations,”Parker said.
“In the past, traditional owners negotiating these contracts had no real choice but to take the deals that were offered or take nothing.”
But the Banjima are working with Rio Tinto and BHP“to ensure a situation like Juukan Gorge is not repeated”.
“We are working together in what we hope continues to be the spirit of a true partnership.
“Protection of such sites is not only of incalculable value to traditional owners and Aboriginal people more broadly, but is also the cultural inheritance of all humanity.”
In June, Guardian Australia revealed that BHP had approval to destroy the sites. BHP then issued a clarification that it would not damage any of them “without further extensive consultation” with the Banjima.
On Tuesday, the BHP chief executive, Mike Henry, said that “deep consultation” was ongoing, but would not clearly rule out the possibility that sites could be affected.
“It’s an ongoing process that has continued for many, many years. As new information comes to light it is shared amongst all parties, and we revisit past decisions,”Henry told ABC TV.
“I expect that through the process of ongoing engagement, we will land on decisions that are informed by the views of the Banjima, together with them.”
In correspondence seen by Guardian Australia, senior elders made it very clear they do not want any of the sites disturbed.
One Milyarranypa Banjima elder quoted in the letter said he and his family “are angry about it and don’t support the destruction of those sites at South Flank under any circumstances”.
The Senate inquiry has been given an exemption to travel to the Pilbara in September to hold face-to-face hearings with traditional owners.
The inquiry is also seeking access from the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura traditional owners to conduct a site visit at Juukan Gorge to see the damage firsthand.
Lorena Allam and Calla Wahlquist continue reporting on these Indigenous investigations (Thu 27 Aug 2020) with a warning that:
More than 100 ancient Aboriginal sites in Western Australia – some of which date before the last ice age – could be destroyed by mining companies which have already obtained legal permission to do so.
While multi-national mining companies engage in the extraction of resources from the ancient territories of Indigenous People, and that they treat as if it were an "empty land", many of the people of Australia have moved on from this colonial mindset.
From Botany Bay to Juukan Gorge, via Possession Island . . .
E. Phillips Fox - Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770. This painting, completed in 1901, was a commission under the Gilbee bequest to paint a historical picture of the landing of Captain Cook for the Melbourne gallery. The painting reflects an early twentieth century understanding of this historical event.The 250th anniversary of this landing took placein April this year, but in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic the planned celebrations have been drastically modified.
In 1769, Lieutenant James Cook in command of HMS Endeavour, travelled to Tahiti to observe and record the transit of Venus. Cook also carried secret Admiralty instructions to locate the supposed Southern Continent: "There is reason to imagine that a continent, or land of great extent, may be found to the southward of the track of former navigators." This continent was not found, a disappointment to Alexander Dalrymple and his fellow members of the Royal Society who had urged the Admiralty to undertake this mission. Cook decided to survey the east coast of New Holland, the only major part of that continent that had not been charted by Dutch navigators.
On 19 April 1770 the Endeavour sighted the east coast of Australia and ten days later landed at Botany Bay. Cook charted the coast to its northern extent and, along with the ship's naturalist, Joseph Banks, who subsequently reported favourably on the possibilities of establishing a colony at Botany Bay. Cook wrote that he formally took possession of the east coast of New Holland on 21/22 August 1770 when on Possession Island off the west coast of Cape York Peninsula. He noted in his journal that he could;
"land no more upon this Eastern coast of New Holland, and on the Western side I can make no new discovery the honour of which belongs to the Dutch Navigatorsand as such they may lay Claim to it as their propertybut the Eastern Coast from the Latitude of 38 South down to this place I am confident was never seen or viseted by any European before us and therefore by the same Rule belongs to great Brittan"
In the original the words in red were crossed out.
Dispossesion Island?
A small island in the Torres Strait Islands group off the coast of far northern Queensland, Australia, is known as Bedanug or Bedhan Lag by one of the Indigenous Australian groups of Torres Strait Islander people, the Kaurareg, though the Ankamuti were also Indigenous to the island.
In 1770 James Cook sailed northward along the east coast of Australia in the Endeavour, anchoring for a week at Botany Bay. Three months later, the Endeavour arrived at this small island, and that was subsequently named Possession Island, and was where Captain Cook claimed possession of the entire east coast he had explored for Britain. In his journal, Cook wrote:
"I now once more hoisted English Coulers and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast...by the name New South Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours Rivers and Islands situate upon the said coast"
Paul Daley, an Australian columnist for the Guardian, marked a previous 250th anniversary, two years before Cook's landing at Botany Bay (Mon 23 Jul 2018), and suggests in Postcolonial - Australia news that:
250 years ago, James Cook was told only to take possession of the land with the consent of Indigenous peoples
Paul Daley writes:
Just as centenary commemorations for the national foundation story that is Anzac end later this year, the government is gearing up to celebrate another yarn that often seems interchangeable – the imminent 250th anniversary of the arrival of Captain James Cook and HM Bark Endeavour.
If you were concerned about an insufficiency of monuments to Cook’s“discovery” of Australia, relax, please. The federal government has already trolled progressive Australians who’d challenge the Endeavour’s continental “discovery” and national foundation myth, with a plan to strip $48m from the ABC for Cook commemorations including something akin to a statuary theme park at Botany Bay where the good captain anchored.
Anzac commemorations have cost commonwealth taxpayers about $600m. Let’s see how much they can dedicate to Cook as the big day approaches.
But first a little rain on the parade. The HMS Endeavour arrived on 29 April 1770. But the secret instructions from the British Admiralty ahead of the voyage were issued on 30 July, 1768 – 250 years ago later this month.
It’s worth reconsidering those secret instructions (well known to Indigenous Australians but not so much to others). Perhaps even more enlightening is a set of “hints” to Cook, his botanist Joseph Banks and the accompanying Swedish-born naturalist, Daniel Solander, before they sailed to the Pacific to observe the transit of Venus across the sun.
Cook received two sets of instructions from the admiralty – the first relating to observing Venus, the second “secret” set ordering him to go and “make discovery of” the great southern continent. So insightful are they to the manner in which Britain claimed and seized the continent, they have been deemed manuscripts number 1 and 2 respectively at the National Library of Australia, the institution that serves, in many ways, as Australia’s national memory and conscience.
The secret instructions read:
You are ... to observe the Genius, Temper, Disposition and Number of the Natives, if there be any and endeavour by all proper means to cultivate a Friendship and Alliance with them, making them presents of such Trifles as they may Value inviting them to Traffick, and Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard; taking Care however not to suffer yourself to be surprised by them, but to be always upon your guard against any Accidents.
You are also with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain: Or: if you find the Country uninhabited take Possession for his Majesty by setting up Proper Marks and Inscriptions, as first discoverers and possessors.
Two things spring to mind here. The first is that the order – “Shewing them every kind of Civility and Regard” – didn’t go so well; Cook’s men fired on the Gweagal tribesmen on the beach, wounding one. A shield bearing a hole from a musket round (Banks insisted in his diary it came from a lance) remains in the British Museum.
The second is this –
“ . . . with the Consent of the Natives to take Possession of Convenient Situations . . .”
Which blackfella ever said,
“Sure Captain, take the lot”?
Which brings us to a letter of “hints” to “Captain Cooke, Mr Bankes,” and Solander from James Douglas, the 14th Earl of Morton and president of the Royal Society in London which in February 1768 petitioned King George III to support the passing of Venus and “discovery” expedition. Douglas, a Scot, was something of a man ahead of his times, a natural philosopher, humanitarian and political iconoclast – a genuinely enlightened product of the Enlightenment.
Douglas’s hints advised the expedition to treat with kindness and understanding any Indigenous people encountered. He urged Cook and his scientists to show “the utmost patience and forbearance with respect to the Natives of the several Lands where the Ship may touch” and proceed with an understanding that asserted, unambiguously, the Indigenous ownership of the land.
Douglas urged them:
To check the petulance of the Sailors and restrain the wanton use of Fire Arms.
To have it still in view that sheding the blood of these people is a crime of the highest nature – They are human creatures, the work of the same omnipotent Author, equally under his care with the most polished European, perhaps being less offensive, more entitled to his favour.
They are the natural, and in the strictest sense of the word, the legal possessors of the several Regions they inhabit.
No European nation has a right to occupy any part of their country or settle among them without their voluntary consent.
Conquest over such people can give no just title; because they could never be the Aggressors.
After landing at Botany Bay Cook sailed north to what is now the tip of Queensland where, on Possession Island, at sunset on Wednesday 22 August 1770, he declared the place a British possession.
Cook named both Moreton Bay and Cape Moreton after Douglas; the translator of Cook’s diaries misspelt his title. But despite that acknowledgment, it seems the earl was ignored.
So, amid the unnecessary new Cook monuments and the inevitable frenzy of commemoration of his “discovery”, bear in mind the prescience of James Douglas, 14th Earl of Morton, in those hints. For he was 224 years ahead of the high court in Mabo and others v Queensland when it came to understanding the fiction of terra nullius on the Great Southern Land.
Terra nullius
Terra nullius is a Latin expression meaning "nobody's land". This legalistic sounding phrase was a principle used in international law to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state's occupation of it, and typifies the mindset of the British expansion and consolidation of its colonial and imperial interests, and echoes that reverberate, even to the present day.
Aboriginal Australians inhabited Australia for over 65,000 years before European settlement, which commenced in 1788. Indigenous customs, rituals and laws were unwritten. It has been claimed that Australia was considered terra nullius at the time of settlement. This is also described as a "doctrine of discovery".
In 1971, in the controversial case of Milirrpum v Nabalco Pty Ltd, popularly known as the Gove land rights case, Justice Richard Blackburn ruled that Australia had been considered "desert and uncultivated" (a term which included territory in which resided "uncivilized inhabitants in a primitive state of society") before European settlement, and therefore, by the law that applied at the time, open to be claimed by right of occupancy, and that there was no such thing as native title in Australian law.
The concept of terra nullius was not considered in this case, however. Court cases in 1977, 1979, and 1982, brought by or on behalf of Aboriginal activists, challenged Australian sovereignty on the grounds that terra nullius had been improperly applied, therefore Aboriginal sovereignty should still be regarded as being intact. The courts rejected these cases, but the Australian High Court left the door open for a reassessment of whether the continent should be considered "settled" or "conquered".
In 1982, Eddie Mabo and four other Torres Strait Islanders from Mer (Murray Island) started legal proceedings to establish their traditional land ownership. This led to Mabo v Queensland (No 1). In 1992, after ten years of hearings before the Queensland Supreme Court and the High Court of Australia, the latter court found that the Merpeople had owned their land prior to annexation by Queensland. The ruling thus had far-reaching significance for the land claims of both Torres Strait Islanders and other Aboriginal Australians.
In 2001 the Kaurareg people successfully claimed native title rights over the island named Possession Island (and other nearby islands).
The controversy over Australian land ownership erupted into the so-called "history wars". The 1992 Mabo decision overturned the doctrine of terra nullius in Australia. These "history wars" are discussed in the Re:LODE Radio post Wednesday, 8 July 2020:
And there is no getting away from these "history wars", or "culture wars", so welcome to all the refugees fleeing from the Third World War, it's an information war, and we are all required to get back to the front line, join the avant garde, and fight for the future of humanity.
As the subject of First Nations art, Captain Cook functions as an exploratory sociopolitical, psychological and cultural probe, revealing the moment of where we find ourselves now along the LODE Zone Line in Australia.
This article, published in The Conversation(April 28, 2020) byBruce Buchan, Associate Professor, Griffith University and Eddie Synot, Centre Manager, Indigenous Law Centre, UNSW, explores a rich, and far from "empty" territory.
They write: Australia’s link to Cook has always been mediated by iconography. Cook was a promise recollected in pigment, bronze and stone to a nation at war with its first inhabitants and possessors.
Cook, and the violence of colonisation in his wake, embodied a claim to a vast inheritance: of Enlightenment and modernity at the expense of peoples already here.
Since his foundational ritual of possession, First Nations people have called for a reckoning with Cook’s legacies, and in recent years First Nations artists have reinvigorated this call.
By invoking the presence of Cook, they ask their audience to recognise how colonisation and empire rendered them all but absent – and his celebration today continues to do so.
Taking possession
In Samuel Calvert’s 1865 print, Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent on Behalf of the British Crown, the noisy presence of the newcomers’ industry and weapons drives two huddled Aboriginal men into the bush.
Wathaurung ElderAunty Marlene Gilson re-worked Calvert’s image in The Landing (2018): widening the lens to show peoples living in the landscape.
Gilson imaginatively runs together Calvert’s imagery with accounts of Governor Phillip’s later landing. As the flag is hoisted ships hover in the bay. Colonisation was a process of denying who was already there, the First Nations families and figures Gilson captures in lively habitation on land and water.
Gilson challenges the mythology of empire:
that empty territory needed no treaty.
Gilson’s image is also a homage to Gordon Bennett’s earlier reworking of Calvert in Possession Island (1991). Bennett deliberately obscured Cook and his companions, with the exception of one dark-skinned servant. The presumptuous act of possession is only glimpsed behind a Jackson Pollock-like forest of lines. Visual static intervenes.
Terra nullius interruptus.
This obscurity stands in marked contrast to Christian Thompson’sOthering the Explorer, James Cook (2015). Part of his Museum of Others series, his images invite us to consider the effacement of First Nations people by colonial authority and knowledge.
Thompson superimposes Cook’s head and shoulders on the artist’s own. His choice of images is deliberate, the 1775 Nathaniel Dance portrait of Cook in full naval regalia glowering over his Pacific “discoveries”.
Since European colonisation, the assertion of the discoverer’s right to possess has erased the rich tapestry of prior ownership and belonging. In Thompson’s wry self-effacement, Cook’s superimposition is a reminder of someone already there.
This was always the coloniser’s ploy. Presence as absence is a conceit of colonisation.
The presence of absence informs Daniel Boyd’s re-imagination of Cook’s landing in We Call Them Pirates Out Here (2006), a re-working of E. Phillips Fox’sLanding of Captain Cook at Botany Bay (1902).
Phillips Fox portrayed Cook restraining his men from shooting the distantly pictured “natives”. This was empire as it wished to be seen: peaceful, British, white and triumphant.
Boyd plays on the flattery of imperial self-imagining by exposing the wilful piracy of colonial possession. Boyd’s Cook cuts the same imperial dash, but with an eye patch and skull and crossbones on the Union Jack behind him empire is revealed as the pirate’s resort.
Challenging mythologies
The growing First Nations challenge to Cook’s iconography highlights his continued presence in our nation’s colonial mythology.
It is a challenge to Cook’s elevation as hero of the modern Australia built on Indigenous erasure. Jason Wing’s bronze bust of a balaclava-wearing Captain James Crook (2013) symbolises that challenge.
Wing’s addition of the balaclava forces us to confront Cook’s legacy not as the projected shining icon of Enlightenment, but as a mythic presence built on deliberate theft, dispossession and violence.
Bruce Buchan and Eddie Synot conclude their article acknowledging that this collection of artists reconsidering the place of Cook in our collective memoryrepresents First Nations artists power to challenge Australians, to reconsider Cook and a nation’s iconography, in a way that is"provocative, challenging, arresting, often satirical and sometimes funny".
"Within the art lies an open invitation to reflect on who we have become and where we are headed."
This ABC News article (Tuesday 28 April 2020), contributing to the conversation in April this year, on the 250th anniversary of Cook's arrival, and on what turned out to be, according to Robert Hughes, a Fatal Shore, takes a cultural position that is significantly post-Mabo, and . . .
. . .terra nullius interruptus . . .
. . . and significantly reflective and revisionist in its acceptance of the colonial experience. The article is headlined:
By Indigenous affairs correspondent Isabella Higgins and Sarah Collard, is an indication of broader changes in Australian society and the changing attitudes that many people possess now, when considering Australia's colonial and postcolonial history.
The tale of James Cook sailing the Endeavour into Botany Bay is familiar to most Australians.
But 250 years on, the descendants of the Aboriginal people who first spotted the English explorer's ship say the history books got at least part of the story wrong.
Our understanding of the events that unfolded on the afternoon of April 29, 1770 come mostly from the journals of Captain Cook and his crew.
They describe sailing into the harbour and being threatened and warned off by the Indigenous people on the shore.
Sydney Parkinson, a young artist employed on the ship, wrote in his journal that local men made threatening gestures with spears and yelled the words "warra warra wai."
He presumed that the words meant "go away," and so for many years his diary entry defined the story of first contact between Aboriginal people and the British.
Now the Dharawal people are sharing their story.
They say the real meaning of those first recorded Indigenous words has been misinterpreted.
Ray Ingrey, Deputy chairperson of the La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council. (ABC News: Elena de Bruijne)
"Warra is a root word for either white or dead in our language," said Ray Ingrey, a Dharawal man and La Perouse Local Aboriginal Land Council deputy chairperson.
"Over time, because of outsiders trying to tell our story for us, it's just being translated into different parts as 'go away'.
"If you are outside our community and trying to look in, you will think it means 'go away' but for us it means 'you're all dead'," he said.
While those words might sound threatening or morbid, Mr Ingrey said it was likely just a warning to other locals at the time.
"When our old people saw the Endeavour coming through, they actually thought it was a low-lying cloud because all they could see was whiteness," he said.
"In Dharawal culture, that low-lying cloud means the spirits of the dead have returned to their country and so they saw almost ghosts.
"So when the two men opposed the landing, they were protecting the country in a spiritual way, from ghosts."
This is the story of first contact that Ray Ingrey wants more Australians to learn and understand.
"There is no taking away of the significance of James Cook, clearly as an amazing explorer. However, history shows that when lands are invaded a lot of the true history is either wiped out or misrepresented,"Mr Ingrey said.
"For a long time, our community has been saying that we need to tell our story our way."
He said Dharawal leaders are working with libraries, museums and linguists to re-evaluate some of the European records, and give a new perspective to Australian history.
"When that happens, when we stop people from misrepresenting our ancestors and our own story, we are able to give the broader Australian public a more authentic story and a story that makes sense."
Chance to 'change the story'
Gweagal and Yuin woman, Theresa Ardler, is also on a journey to educate Australians about her ancestors' story from that fateful day 250 years ago.
Written records from Cook's crew make it clear a conflict occurred during that first meeting of two cultures.
Journal entries describe the Aboriginal men threatening the crew, until eventually gunshots are fired at them, but it is not made clear whether the local men lived or died.
Ms Ardler believes she is the descendant of a Gweagal warrior, named Cooman, who was one of two men who defended his country from the British explorers.
She said the oral history of the event passed down by her elders was different to the one in the history books.
"I was in high school in Year 10 studying Cook, and we were reading a book that said the bullets were fired over their heads.
"I remember getting up in my class and saying, 'this is wrong, this is not the true history', because my grandfather was shot.
"I said everyone needs to rip that page out of your book."
Ms Ardler is now fighting for the possible physical evidence of the conflict to be returned to Australian shores.
A bark shield pierced with a bullet hole, named the "Gweagal Shield", now sits in the British Museum.
The British Museum states it is "suggested and not confirmed" that the shield belonged to the warrior Cooman when he was shot at by Cook's landing party.
"We are still waiting to get that shield back,"Ms Ardler said. "I want to work on some repatriation [because] it's that very spiritual connection we have with those objects.
"I have deep sadness [leading up to this anniversary] and I've been very much reflecting on my ancestors.
"Our culture is not dead, it is living and thriving decades on."
Captain Cook archives re-imagined
Some of the formative records that have helped shape our understanding of Cook's landing are now being opened up to the public.
The State Library of New South Wales will launch an online exhibition that will, for the first time, digitise some of the journals of those onboard the HMS Endeavour.
The exhibition explores the arrival of the ship and the eight days the crew spent in Botany Bay in 1770, but focuses on the lesser-known "stories from the shore".
"We were trying with this exhibition to get more of a Gweagal perspective on what happened," curator Ronald Briggs said.
"Endeavour and the crew's arrival in Kamay, Botany Bay — it's celebrated, it's commemorated, but it's also contested.
"Many of the records and information we keep in institutions like this one are from a European perspective [and] they had no meaningful understanding of Aboriginal culture at the time."
The library worked with the descendants of the Gweagal people to try to reinterpret some of the historical texts.
"With a lot of language recording by non-Indigenous people, there is often confusion about what words actually mean and you know, the cultural perspective in which it's used."
"This is a chance for us to get a better understanding of what really happened, and we can start to get as close to the truth of those events as we possibly can."
The library's exhibition will launch online in the coming weeks, and turn into a physical display when pandemic restrictions are lifted.
The National Museum has partnered with the ABC in an ABC iview series featuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people sharing the original names of the places Captain Cook renamed on his voyage of the east coast.
While an increasing percentage of the Australian population have shifted their cultural and political attitudes during the long, and continuing "history wars", the mining companies operating in the Pilbara (or eleswhere along the LODE Zone Line in Indonesia, Colombia and India for that matter), have been blindsided by their foundational origins, the propensity of most capitalist enterprise over the centuries, and, to rephrase the secret instructions from the British Admiralty:
“ . . . to take Possession of Convenient Situations without the Consent of the Natives . . .”
Hence the existential and cultural catastrophe for Indigenous People of the care-less destruction of . . .
An internationally renowned anthropologist has raised concerns about the preservation of thousands of priceless artefacts from ancient rock shelters in the Pilbara, removed before Rio Tinto blasted the site to mine for iron ore.
Key points:
Anthropologist gives evidence at parliamentary inquiry into the destruction of caves at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia
Professor Glynn Cochrane is concerned ancient Indigenous artefacts removed from the site are not being stored properly
There are fears the priceless objects are sitting in shipping containers
There are fears for the preservation of the ancient objects, as experts say they are sitting in shipping containers and are not being stored according to museum standards.
Rio Tinto's approach to Aboriginal heritage is under the microscope as former employees give evidence to a parliamentary inquiry investigating the destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves in May.
Objects found during previous archaeological work at the sites, including stone, wooden tools and a plait of human hair, helped establish evidence of human habitation stretching back 46,000 years.
Professor Glynn Cochrane, who worked for Rio Tinto in community engagement for two decades, told the inquiry there were 7,000 artefacts removed from the caves in the years before the detonators were put in place.
"We have no idea still, in 2020, where the final keeping place will be for these very important artefacts," he said.
"It is almost like blowing up the tomb of the unknown soldier and forgetting about the occupant."
Foxes in charge of the chickens'
Professor Cochrane also criticised the process for dealing with heritage concerns, which involves the state government and the mine itself, saying it was akin to "putting two foxes in charge of the chickens".
The destruction has damaged Rio Tinto's relationship with the Puutu Kunti Kurrama people and the Pinikura (PKKP) traditional owners, as well as its international reputation.
Federal Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt said mining companies needed to consult with traditional owners no matter what level of government approval they had been granted.
"You cannot make assumptions that a site is not relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people unless you sit and talk with the traditional owners," he said.
"Even though you may, in WA's case, be given a Section 18 approval by the minister, don't make the assumption that it's carte blanche to destroy a site."
The federal parliamentary committee plans to travel to the Pilbara to meet directly with PKKP representatives next month.
The committee members have permission from the West Australian Government to travel there despite the hard border closure currently in place.
The federal politicians hope to inspect the blast site themselves during the visit.
Traditional owners request items be stored on country
Rio Tinto's own submission to the parliamentary inquiry confirms "remains", "artefacts" and other items taken from the caves are being stored in the mining company's Dampier office, in north-west WA, and at a "storage facility" at the mine site.
This week's internal review committed the company to work with the PKKP to establish a "keeping place" for the items that would be under the control of traditional owners.
The company said it conducted the salvage operation, which included taking a latex peel of a cave wall, in collaboration with "leading experts" and the PKKP, and consulted academics and the WA museum about appropriate storage.
Rio Tinto also said it created a one-hour documentary about the site.
The mining company said traditional owners requested the artefacts be stored on country, to keep the items on their traditional lands.
ABC News - Rio Tinto knew . . .
This example of cultural vandalism, reminiscent of a colonial relationship to both the ancient and managed landscape and the Indigenous People who look after these lands, was an act of destruction allowed within the current legislation. Nevertheless, Rio Tinto was, in the end, made accountable, by dint of a significant public outpouring of disgust and dismay, a response that points to a changing environment for commercial interests in the mining industry.
Q. Is public accountability activated only when a scandal goes too far?
A. The jury is out on this one!
An example of an ongoing scandal is the impact of the "business as usual" commercial and industrial environment upon global biodiversity, where there is scant evidence of governmental accountability across the planet.
Q. Is the world on a pathway to extinction?
A. ‘Humanity at a crossroads’ after a decade in which all of the 2010 Aichi goals to protect wildlife and ecosystems have been missed
So, the headline to Patrick Greenfield's report for the Guardian Environment theme,The age of extinction (Tue 15 Sep 2020). He writes:
The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade, according to a devastating new report from the UN on the state of nature.
The Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, published before a key UN summit on the issue later this month, found that despite progress in some areas, natural habitats have continued to disappear, vast numbers of species remain threatened by extinction from human activities, and $500bn (£388bn) of environmentally damaging government subsidies have not been eliminated.
Six targets have been partially achieved, including those on protected areas and invasive species. While governments did not manage to protect 17% of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10% of marine habitats, 44% of vital biodiverse areas are now under protection, an increase from 29% in 2000. About 200 successful eradications of invasive species on islands have also taken place.
The UN said the natural world was deteriorating and failure to act could undermine the goals of the Paris agreement on the climate crisis and the sustainable development goals.
The UN’s biodiversity head, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, said humanity was at a crossroads that would decide how future generations experience the natural world.
“Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised. And the more humanity exploits nature in unsustainable ways and undermines its contributions to people, the more we undermine our own wellbeing, security and prosperity,” she said.
The report is the third in a week to highlight the devastating state of the planet. The WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s Living Planet Report 2020 said global wildlife populations were in freefall, plunging by two-thirds, because of human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture. On Monday, the RSPB said the UK had failed to reach 17 of the Aichi targets and that the gap between rhetoric and reality had resulted in a “lost decade for nature”.
The 20 Aichi biodiversity targets are broken down into 60 separate elements to monitor overall progress. Of those, seven have been achieved, 38 have shown progress and 13 elements have shown no progress. Progress remains unknown for two elements.
A dead anteater lies on the road near a burning tract of the Amazon jungle, in Rondonia State, Brazil, August 2020.
A leading target to halve the loss of natural habitats, including forests, has not been met. While global deforestation rates have decreased by about a third in the past five years compared with pre-2010 levels, the degradation and fragmentation of biodiversity-rich ecosystems in the tropics remains high. Wilderness areas and wetlands have continued to disappear and freshwater ecosystems remain critically threatened.
Half a trillion dollars of harmful government subsidies for agriculture, fossil fuels and fishing are highlighted in the report as a particular area of concern by its lead author, David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
“We are still seeing so much more public money invested in things that harm biodiversity than in things that support biodiversity,” he said.
Although there has been progress in some regions, the proportion of overfished marine stocks has increased in the last decade to a third of the total, and many non-target species are threatened because of unsustainable levels of bycatch. As a result, the target to sustainably manage and harvest all fish and invertebrate stocks has not been met.
Plastic waste and excess nutrients have not been brought to levels that do not damage ecosystem function and biodiversity around the world, according to the report. About 260,000 tonnes of plastic particles have accumulated in oceans with severe impacts on marine ecosystems, often with unknown implications. Electronics pollution is also highlighted as an issue of increasing concern, fuelled by high consumption rates.
More than 60% of the world’s coral reefs are under threat, especially because of overfishing and destructive practices, and a 2015 target to minimise threats was missed. It was also missed in 2020, with the climate crisis, ocean acidification and costal development blamed for their poor state.
Overfishing has contributed to the threat facing 60% of the world’s coral reefs.
The target on protecting life-sustaining ecosystems while taking into account the needs of women, indigenous communities and poor people were not met. The assessment of the state of nature on Earth found ecosystems that provide clean water, medicine and support livelihoods have not been protected, disproportionally affecting women and vulnerable communities.
The report authors, however, pointed to the conservation efforts that led to as many as 48 species being saved from extinction in recent decades as a sign of hope.
Cooper said: “Hidden behind those global aggregates there is important progress and, you know, that gives us signs that if you do put policies in place, they do work.”
He added that the failure to meet the targets was down to certain governments not understanding the scale of the challenge faced by the natural world. “I think countries are taking it seriously, but perhaps sometimes they’re leaving it to the environment ministries and not elevating this enough to something that’s got to be the whole of government.”
The report comes as parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity negotiate the targets for this decade.
The final round of negotiations for agreement had been scheduled to take place in Kunming, China, last October but have been delayed by the coronavirus pandemic and are now expected to take place in May 2021.
A significant part of the draft proposal is to protect 30% of the planet.
A scandal? Yes! But beware the temptation to despair. Actions produce results . . .
Up to 48 bird and mammal extinctions have been prevented by conservation efforts since a global agreement to protect biodiversity, according to a new study.
The Iberian lynx, California condor and pygmy hog are among animals that would have disappeared without reintroduction programmes, zoo-based conservation and formal legal protections since 1993, research led by scientists at Newcastle University and BirdLife International found.
The study, published in the journal Conservation Letters, estimates that extinction rates for birds and mammals would have been three to four times higher over that period, which was chosen because 1993 is when the UN Convention on Biological Diversity came into force.
Since then, 15 bird and mammal species have become extinct or are strongly suspected to have disappeared. But researchers say that between 28 and 48 bird and mammal species were saved.
An endangered Puerto Rican amazon parrot near the Rio Abajo Nature Preserve, in Puerto Rico.
They include the Puerto Rican amazon, a small parrot that had dwindled to only 13 wild individuals in 1975, and was saved from extinction by a reintroduction programme in a state park on the Caribbean island. The original group was wiped out by hurricanes in 2017.
In Mongolia, around 760 Przewalski’s horses roam the steppes once again, despite having become extinct in the wild in 1960. Reintroduction efforts in the early 90s mean there is now a self-sustaining wild population of the animals.
Dr Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International and instigator of the study, said the findings showed that commitments to prevent future species loss were “achievable and essential to sustain a healthy planet” and gave hope to conservation efforts for other species.
Using information on population size, trends, threats and conservation efforts from 137 global experts, researchers filtered a longlist of 17,046 bird and mammal species to identify a shortlist of 81 that were listed as threatened on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s red list. The details were then used to calculate the likelihood that each species would have become extinct without conservation measures.
Przewalski wild horses in the Hortobagy national park, in the puszta or Hungarian steppe.
Researchers found between 21 and 32 bird extinctions had been prevented and that between seven and 16 mammals had been saved. The ranges reflect uncertainty about the estimates.
Birds analysed in the study benefited from invasive species control, zoo conservation and habitat protection, while mammals were helped by legislation, introduction schemes and zoo collections.
Despite the hopeful findings for conservationists, some species in the study experienced declines, such as the critically endangered vaquita, a porpoise found in the Gulf of California that is threatened by illegal fishing.
Dr Rike Bolam from Newcastle University, co-lead author of the study, said: “It is encouraging that some of the species have recovered very well. Our analyses provide a strikingly positive message that conservation has substantially reduced extinction rates for birds and mammals.”
The findings come as a report out today from the World Wide Fund for Nature warns that animal populations have plunged on average by 68% since 1970, but acknowledges that conservation efforts can work.
The UN’s fifth Global Biodiversity Outlook report next week will show whether governments have met conservation targets agreed in 2010, including a goal to prevent extinctions of species known to be threatened.
A California condor takes off along the Big Sur Coast of California.
While the UN report is widely expected to show that the targets have not been met, the BirdLife study authors said their findings showed that governments should be encouraged to reaffirm their commitment to halting extinctions in the agreement for this decade, which has been called “the Paris agreement for nature”.
Newcastle University professor Phil McGowan, who co-led the study and heads an IUCN Species Survival Commission taskforce, said the findings were “a glimmer of hope” but that continuing extinctions should not be forgotten.
“We usually hear bad stories about the biodiversity crisis and there is no doubt that we are facing an unprecedented loss in biodiversity through human activity. The loss of entire species can be stopped if there is sufficient will to do so. This is a call to action: showing the scale of the issue and what we can achieve if we act now to support conservation and prevent extinction,” he said.
The Puerto Rican amazon parrot population is vulnerable to climate change extreme weather events and was hit hard by Hurricane Maria
A report by Associated Press appeared in The Washington Post November 20, 2018 runs under the headline:
Biologists are trying to save the last of the endangered Puerto Rican parrots after more than half the population of the birds disappeared when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. The storm destroyed the food sources and habitats of the bright green birds with turquoise-tipped wings.
The Puerto Rican Amazon is Puerto Rico’s only remaining native parrot and is one of about 30 species of Amazon parrots found in the Americas. In the tropical forest of El Yunque, only two of 56 wild birds survived the Category 4 storm that pummeled the U.S. territory in September 2017. Four of 31 survived in a forest in the western town of Maricao. And 75 out of 134 in the Rio Abajo forest in the central mountains of Puerto Rico survived, scientists said.
“We have a lot of work to do,” said Gustavo Olivieri, parrot recovery program coordinator for Puerto Rico’s Department of Natural Resources.
Federal and local scientists will meet next month to debate how best to bring back a species that numbered more than 1 million in the 1800s but decreased to 13 birds during the 1970s after decades of forest clearing.
More than 460 birds remain captive at the breeding centers in El Yunque and Rio Abajo forests, but scientists have not released any of them since Hurricane Maria. Scientists are now trying to determine the best way to prepare the parrots for release — because there are so few birds in the wild with which they can interact — and whether Puerto Rico’s damaged forests can sustain them. “Our priority now is not reproduction. . . . It’s to start releasing them,” said Marisel Lopez, who oversees the parrot recovery program at El Yunque for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, adding that breeding centers can hold only so many parrots.
But first, scientists need to make sure the forests can offer food and safe shelter. Many of the large trees where parrots used to nest are gone.
Scientists also are collecting new data on the number of predators at El Yunque, including a red-tailed hawk that hunts Puerto Rico parrots.
Ilse said scientists plan to help the forest recover through planting. By the end of November, they expect to have a map detailing the most damaged areas in El Yunque and a list of tree species they can plant that are more resistant to hurricanes.
“People keep asking us, ‘How long is it going to take?’ ”Ilse said. But scientists don’t know, she added.
Mass soybean harvesting in Campo Verde, Brazil. Intensive agricultures has contributed to the collapse of some animal populations
This image was used to illustrate the report by Patrick Greenfield for the Guardian (Thu 10 Sep 2020) on the Living Planet Report 2020.
Animal populations have plunged an average of 68% since 1970, as humanity pushes the planet’s life support systems to the edge
Patrick Greenfield writes:
Wildlife populations are in freefall around the world, driven by human overconsumption, population growth and intensive agriculture, according to a major new assessment of the abundance of life on Earth.
On average, global populations of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles plunged by 68% between 1970 and 2016, according to the WWF and Zoological Society of London (ZSL)’s biennial Living Planet Report 2020. Two years ago, the figure stood at 60%.
The research is one of the most comprehensive assessments of global biodiversity available and was complied by 134 experts from around the world. It found that from the rainforests of central America to the Pacific Ocean, nature is being exploited and destroyed by humans on a scale never previously recorded.
The analysis tracked global data on 20,811 populations of 4,392 vertebrate species. Those monitored include high-profile threatened animals such as pandas and polar bears as well as lesser known amphibians and fish. The figures, the latest available, showed that in all regions of the world, vertebrate wildlife populations are collapsing, falling on average by more than two-thirds since 1970.
Robin Freeman, who led the research at ZSL, said: “It seems that we’ve spent 10 to 20 years talking about these declines and not really managed to do anything about it. It frustrates me and upsets me. We sit at our desks and compile these statistics but they have real-life implications. It’s really hard to communicate how dramatic some of these declines are.”
Latin America and the Caribbean recorded the most alarming drop, with an average fall of 94% in vertebrate wildlife populations. Reptiles, fish and amphibians in the region were most negatively affected, driven by the overexploitation of ecosystems, habitat fragmentation and disease.
Africa and the Asia Pacific region have also experienced large falls in the abundance of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles, dropping 65% and 45% respectively. Europe and central Asia recorded a fall of 24%, while populations dropped 33% on average in North America. To form the Living Planet Index (LPI), akin to a stock market index of wildlife, more biodiverse parts of the world, such as tropical regions, are given more weighting.
Experts said the LPI was further evidence of the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, with one million species at risk because of human activity, according to the UN’s global assessment report in 2019. Deforestation and the conversion of wild spaces for human food production have largely been blamed for the destruction of Earth’s web of life.
The report highlights that 75% of the Earth’s ice-free land has been significantly altered by human activity, and almost 90% of global wetlands have been lost since 1700.
Mike Barrett, executive director of conservation and science at WWF, said: “Urgent and immediate action is necessary in the food and agriculture sector. All the indicators of biodiversity loss are heading the wrong way rapidly. As a start, there has got to be regulation to get deforestation out of our supply chain straight away. That’s absolutely vital.”
Robin Freeman, who led the research at ZSL, said: “It seems that we’ve spent 10 to 20 years talking about these declines and not really managed to do anything about it. It frustrates me and upsets me. We sit at our desks and compile these statistics but they have real-life implications. It’s really hard to communicate how dramatic some of these declines are.”
Latin America and the Caribbean recorded the most alarming drop, with an average fall of 94% in vertebrate wildlife populations. Reptiles, fish and amphibians in the region were most negatively affected, driven by the overexploitation of ecosystems, habitat fragmentation and disease.
A tiger in Bardia national park, Nepal, a species that is showing signs of recovery. Photograph: Emmanuel Rondeau/WWF
Africa and the Asia Pacific region have also experienced large falls in the abundance of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles, dropping 65% and 45% respectively. Europe and central Asia recorded a fall of 24%, while populations dropped 33% on average in North America. To form the Living Planet Index (LPI), akin to a stock market index of wildlife, more biodiverse parts of the world, such as tropical regions, are given more weighting.
Experts said the LPI was further evidence of the sixth mass extinction of life on Earth, with one million species at risk because of human activity, according to the UN’s global assessment report in 2019. Deforestation and the conversion of wild spaces for human food production have largely been blamed for the destruction of Earth’s web of life.
The report highlights that 75% of the Earth’s ice-free land has been significantly altered by human activity, and almost 90% of global wetlands have been lost since 1700.
Mike Barrett, executive director of conservation and science at WWF, said: “Urgent and immediate action is necessary in the food and agriculture sector. All the indicators of biodiversity loss are heading the wrong way rapidly. As a start, there has got to be regulation to get deforestation out of our supply chain straight away. That’s absolutely vital.”
Freshwater areas are among the habitats suffering the greatest damage, according to the report, with one in three species in those areas threatened by extinction and an average population drop of 84%. The species affected include the critically endangered Chinese sturgeon in the Yangtze River, which is down by 97%. Advertisement
Using satellite analysis, the report also finds that wilderness areas – defined as having no human imprint – only account for 25% of the Earth’s terrestrial area and are largely restricted to Russia, Canada, Brazil and Australia.
Matécho Forest in French Guiana. Rainforests around the world are subject to overexploitation. Photograph: Roger Leguen/WWF
Tanya Steele, chief executive at WWF, said: “We are wiping wildlife from the face of the planet, burning our forests, polluting and over-fishing our seas and destroying wild areas. We are wrecking our world – the one place we call home – risking our health, security and survival here on Earth.”
Sir David Attenborough said that humanity has entered a new geological age – the anthropocene – where humans dominate the Earth, but said it could be the moment we learn to become stewards of our planet.
“Doing so will require systemic shifts in how we produce food, create energy, manage our oceans and use materials. But above all it will require a change in perspective,” he wrote in a collection of essays accompanying the report.
“The time for pure national interests has passed, internationalism has to be our approach and in doing so bring about a greater equality between what nations take from the world and what they give back. The wealthier nations have taken a lot and the time has now come to give.”
While the data is dominated by the decline of wildlife populations around the world, the index showed that some species can recover with conservation efforts. The blacktail reef shark in Australia and Nepalese tiger populations have both shown signs of recovery.
ZSL research associate Louise McRae, who has helped compile the LPI for the last 14 years, said: “Whilst we are giving a very depressing statistic, all hope is not lost. We can actually help populations recover.
“I feel frustrated by having to give a stark and desperate message but I think there’s a positive side to it as well.”
A separate study released today by Newcastle University and BirdLife International says that at least 28 bird and mammal extinctions have been prevented by conservation efforts since the UN Convention on Biological Diversity came into force in 1993.
Postscript
This representation of planet Earth, with all land massesdefined by the flags of the world's individual sovereign nations, showsthe present fragmentation of the global human population into national societies. But the challenge of survivability, of mass extinctions, and the habitability of the planet for the entire human race, is a matter that can only be addressed bynations of the planet working together, and NOT in competition. In other words, theUnited Nations, and with all of its problems included.
And the oceans . . .
When it comes to sovereign territories, the notion of "empty land" or terra nullius, "nobody's land", applies to seas and oceans as well. For example:
The Philippines and the People's Republic of China both claim the Scarborough Shoal or Panatag Shoal or Huangyan Island (黄岩岛), nearest to the island of Luzon, located in the South China Sea. The Philippines claims it under the principles of terra nullius and EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone). China's claim refers to its discovery in the 13th century by Chinese fishermen. (The former Nationalist government on the Chinese mainland had also claimed this territory after the founding of the Republic of China in 1911.) However, despite China's position of non-participation in an UNCLOS case, in 2016 the PCA denied the lawfulness of China's "Nine-Dash Line" claim. Despite this, China continues to build artificial islands in the South China Sea, and Scarborough Shoal is a prime location for another one.
The nine-dash line—at various times also referred to as the ten-dash line and the eleven-dash line—refers to the undefined and vaguely located demarcation line used byChina (People's Republic of China) and Taiwan (Republic of China), for their claims of the major part of the South China Sea. The contested area in the South China Sea includes the Paracel Islands, the Spratly Islands, and various other areas including the Pratas Islands, the Macclesfield Bank and the Scarborough Shoal. The claim encompasses the area of Chinese land reclamation known as the "Great Wall of Sand”.
China's 1947 map depicting the "eleven-dash line".
An early map showing a U-shaped eleven-dash line was published in the then-Republic of China on 1 December 1947. Two of the dashes in the Gulf of Tonkin were later removed at the behest of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, reducing the total to nine.Chinese scholars asserted at the time that the version of the map with nine dashes represented the maximum extent of historical claims to the area. In 2010, the PRC published a new national map which incorporated a tenth dash. Subsequent editions added a dash to the other end of the line, extending it into the East China Sea.
Despite having made the vague claim public in 1947, China has not filed a formal and specifically defined claim to the area within the dashes. China added a tenth dash to the east of Taiwan island in 2013 as a part of its official sovereignty claim to the disputed territories in the South China Sea.
On 12 July 2016, an arbitral tribunal constituted under Annex VII to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea ruled that China has no legal basis to claim "historic rights" within its nine-dash line in a case brought by the Philippines. The tribunal judged that there was no evidence that China had historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or resources within the nine-dash line. The ruling was rejected by both the PRC and ROC governments.
Q. The trouble with hegemony?
A. Competition!
Hegemony - leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others. In ancient Greece (8th century BC – 6th century AD), hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of a city-state over other city-states.
The dominant state is known as the "hegemon".
In the 19th century, hegemony came to denote the "Social or cultural predominance or ascendancy; predominance by one group within a society or milieu". Later, it could be used to mean "a group or regime which exerts undue influence within a society". Also, it could be used for the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country over others, from which was derived hegemonism, as in the idea that the Great Powers meant to establish European hegemony over Africa, Asia and Latin America.
In cultural imperialism, the leader state dictates the internal politics and the societal character of the subordinate states that constitute the hegemonic sphere of influence, either by an internal, sponsored government or by an external, installed government.
In international relations theory, hegemony denotes a situation of (i) great material asymmetry in favour of one state, that has (ii) enough military power to systematically defeat any potential contester in the system, (iii) controls the access to raw materials, natural resources, capital and markets, (iv) has competitive advantages in the production of value added goods, (v) generates an accepted ideology reflecting this status quo; and (vi) is functionally differentiated from other states in the system, being expected to provide certain public goods such as security, or commercial and financial stability.
The Marxist theory of cultural hegemony, associated particularly with Antonio Gramsci, is the idea that the ruling class can manipulate the value system and mores of a society, so that their view becomes the world view (Weltanschauung): in Terry Eagleton'swords, "Gramsci normally uses the word hegemony to mean the ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates". In contrast to authoritarian rule, cultural hegemony "is hegemonic only if those affected by it also consent to and struggle over its common sense".
While China extends its hegemony in spatial terms, and "digs its heels in", as in "tug of war", the US opts for challenge and confrontation.
ABC News takes a look at the importance of this little-known but vital waterway in the South China Sea, where there is ongoing "sabre rattling" reminiscent of nineteenth-century imperialist competition for influence, and/or, dominating control, i.e.hegemony.
In this story for ABC News by Luis Martinez (6 May 2019), writing under the headline and subheading:
The Navy routinely challenges China's territorial claims in South China Sea.
Two U.S. Navy destroyers sailed within 12 miles of Chinese-claimed artificial islands in the South China Sea on Monday, and, as expected, the operation drew swift condemnation from China.
Why does the U.S. Navy carry out these missions in the South China Sea? And why has China built artificial islands in the South China Sea?
ABC News takes a look at the importance of this little-known but vital waterway.
DigitalGlobe satellite imagery shows the Subi Reef in the South China Sea, a part of the Spratly Islands group, May 28, 2018.
What's going on in the South China Sea?
The South China Sea makes up the body of water that lies east of Vietnam, west of the Philippines and west of the island of Borneo.
It's a vital waterway with a third of the world's global shipping passing through it every year, much of it going through the strategic Strait of Malacca.
Since China is one of the world's great economies, it sees stability in the South China Sea as key to maintaining economic security.
DigitalGlobe satellite imagery from Sept. 3, 2015 and Aug. 15, 2018 show the progress of development on the Fiery Cross Reef located in the South China Sea.
China is one of five countries in the region staking claim to some of the more than 70 reefs and islets in the South China Sea.
In recent years, China has projected itself militarily into the South China Sea by building up facilities on the Paracel and Spratly island chains.
The Paracels are a group of islands east of Vietnam administered by China that are also claimed by Taiwan and Vietnam.
The Spratly Islands are a collection of several dozen low-lying islands and reefs close to Borneo. In 2014 China began massive dredging operations to build artificial islands around seven reefs that they claimed as their territory.
The artificial islands have been transformed into significant military facilities including three runways that have been used for the deployment of Chinese fighter jets.
China's new military presence and territorial claims are an attempt to project its power into the region and provide stability to the waterway.
But the United States and other countries in the region view things differently, seeing China's territorial claims and military projection as destabilizing and attempts at intimidation.
Despite a 2016 ruling by an international body that China was violating the Law of the Sea Convention with some of its maritime claims, China has continued building up its infrastructure in the South China Sea. In 2018, China placed anti-ship cruise missiles and long-range surface-to-air missiles on the contested Spratly Islands, according to a recent Pentagon report.
What are Freedom of Navigation Operations?
Every year, the U.S. Navy carries out Freedom of Navigation Operations worldwide to challenge excessive maritime claims. But the FONOPs of China's claims in the South China Sea that always draw the most attention.
U.S. officials have said that the FONOPs directed at China are intended to reinforce international frameworks that China has sought to erode by pushing into the South China Sea.
According to International Law, a country's territorial water limits extend 12 nautical miles from its coastline. The same standard applies to territorial airspace.
Both U.S. Navy and Air Force aircraft will sometimes fly above the disputed island groups in the South China Sea to make the point that they are flying through international airspace.
US Navy photo obtained by gcaptain.com of the USS Decatur's close encounter with a Chinese warship on September 30, 2018
Any country that makes a new claim of air or water sovereignty over internationally recognized waters can experience a FONOP. The Pentagon's annual FONOP report for 2017 includes challenges of maritime claims made by countries as far ranging as Albania and Sri Lanka.
The United States is not the only country carrying out FONOPs in the South China Sea. Last August, the Royal Navy's HMS Albion sailed past the Paracel Islands.
While conducting FONOPs, U.S. Navy ships sail within the 12-mile limit to make the point that the waters are international.
To stress the point even further, some of the operations include "man overboard" drills to demonstrate the Navy's ability to operate in international waters.
China routinely condemns U.S. FONOP operations as violations of its sovereignty.
U.S. Navy ships carrying out FONOPs in the Paracel or Spratly Islands are usually shadowed by Chinese ships. During those operations, they receive constant radio messages from Chinese authorities that they are violating Chinese territory, and, in return, the American ships send back messages, read from a prepared script, that they are transiting through international waters.
Most transits have been uneventful, but last October's FONOP by the USS Decatur off of Gaven Reef in the Spratlys drew international attention.
As with previous transits, the Navy destroyer was shadowed by a Chinese Navy ship that sailed at a good distance on its port side. But then the Decatur's crew had to take evasive maneuvers to avoid a collision when the Chinese vessel came within 45 yards of the ship's bow.
That incident remains the closest call yet between American and Chinese vessels in the South China Sea -- a reminder that normal operations can quickly become international incidents.
When the ancestors of today's Aboriginal People arrived to inhabit the continent of Australia it was an empty land and "nobody's land". This history of Indigenous Australians began at least 65,000 years ago when humans first populated the Australian continental landmasses. The origin of the first humans to populate the southern continent and the pieces of land which became islands as ice receded and sea levels rose remains a matter of conjecture and debate. Some anthropologists believe they could have arrived as a result of the earliest human migrations out of Africa. Although they likely migrated to the territory later named Australia through Southeast Asia, Aboriginal Australians are not demonstrably related to any known Asian or Melanesian population, although Torres Strait Islander people do have a genetic link to some Melanesian populations. There is evidence of genetic and linguistic interchange between Australians in the far north and the Austronesian peoples of modern-day New Guinea and the islands, but this may be the result of recent trade and intermarriage.
It is believed that the first early human migration to Australia was achieved when this landmass formed part of the Sahul continent, connected to the island of New Guinea via a land bridge. It is also possible that people came by island hopping via an island chain between Sulawesi and New Guinea and the other reaches North Western Australia via Timor. The exact timing of the arrival of the ancestors of the Aboriginal Australians is still unknown, but recent findings have suggested a time around 65,000 years BP.
There is considerable archaeological discussion as to the route taken by the first colonisers. People appear to have arrived by sea during a period of glaciation, when New Guinea and Tasmania were joined to the continent; however, the journey still required sea travel, making them among the world's earlier mariners.
Uncivilized peoples do not qualify as inhabitants of a land according to the British Crown in 1840
In 1840, Lieutenant William Hobson, following instructions of the British government,
pronounced the southern island of New Zealand to be uninhabited by civilized peoples,
which qualified the land to be terra nullius, and therefore fit for the Crown's political occupation. Hobson's decision was also influenced by a small party of French settlers heading towards Akaroa on Banks Peninsula to settle in 1840.
This convenient denial of the history of the Māori is and was absurd. This history began with the arrival of Polynesian settlers in New Zealand (Aotearoa in Māori), in a series of ocean migrations in canoes starting from the late 13th or early 14th centuries. Over several centuries of isolation, the Polynesian settlers formed a distinct culture that became known as the Māori.
In New Zealand, there are no human remains, artefacts or structures which are confidently dated to earlier than the Kaharoa Tephra, a layer of volcanic debris deposited by the Mount Tarawera eruption around 1314 CE. The 1999 dating of some kiore (Polynesian rat) bones to as early as 10 CE was later found to be an error. New samples of rat bone (and also of rat-gnawed shells and woody seed cases) gave dates later than the Tarawera eruption except for three which dated to a decade or so before the eruption.
Pollen evidence of widespread forest fires a decade or two before the eruption has led some scientists to speculate that humans may have lit them, in which case the first settlement date could have been somewhere in the period 1280–1320 CE which is now a widely quoted date. However, the most recent synthesis of archaeological and genetic evidence concludes that, whether or not some settlers arrived before the Tarawera eruption, the main settlement period was in the decades after it, somewhere between 1320 and 1350 CE, possibly involving a coordinated mass migration. This scenario is also consistent with a much debated third line of evidence – traditional genealogies (whakapapa) which point to 1350 AD as a probable arrival date for many of the founding canoes (waka) from which most Māori trace their descent.
Māori oral history describes the arrival of ancestors in a number of large ocean-going canoes, or waka, from Hawaiki. Hawaiki is the spiritual homeland of many eastern Polynesian societies and is widely considered to be mythical. However, a number of researchers think it is a real place – the traditionally important island of Raiatea in the Leeward Society Islands (in French Polynesia), which, in the local dialect, was called Havai'i. Migration accounts vary among tribes (iwi), whose members may identify with several waka in their genealogies.
With them the settlers brought a number of species which thrived: the kumara, taro, yams, gourd, tī, paper mulberry – and dogs and rats. It is likely that other species from their homeland were also brought, but did not survive the journey or thrive on arrival.
In the last few decades, mitochondrial-DNA (mtDNA) research has allowed an estimate to be made of the number of women in the founding population, of between 50 and 100.
Migration to empty lands is no longer an option!
Whatever the pressures on population have been over the millennia to migrate and settle away from home, the global human population cannot escape a shared responsibility to mitigate the catastrophic consequences of global heating.
If lands become empty of human inhabitants in the future it is more than likely that it is because these lands will have become uninhabitable.
The 2050 Pathways Platform was launched at COP22 by high-level climate champion and architect of the Paris Agreement Laurence Tubiana. The Platform supports countries in the development of long-term, deep decarbonization strategies, as invited by Article 4.19 of the Paris Agreement.
Designed as a collective problem-solving space, the Platform facilitates the sharing of knowledge and experiences between and within countries. The Platform provides financial and technical assistance to those countries which have identified such needs.
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