Tony Whitbread

Ecologist, interested in ecosystems and natural functioning. Views are my own.

[Rupert Read 🌍 🔥 @GreenRupertRead]

I've made a research-based attempt to imagine a global future - starting seven years from now. Please read it and then pause. I want you to think about what your own life would be like in these times. Picture the everyday. Stay with the details.

https://t.co/I9QGO2lf6e

[Rupert Read 🌍 🔥 @GreenRupertRead]

"...when people start to understand that there is stuff they can do and start to get together...then they will... get into a virtuous circle of feeling 'actually, I'm not alone anymore'..."

See my full talk at the at the Southeast Climate Alliance's annual gathering: https://t.co/C3pRnzfY9d

[Rupert Read 🌍 🔥 @GreenRupertRead]

What if civilisational breakdown didn't have to mean chaos? In this short video, I introduce a new piece, co-written with Jem Bendell, to mark the 5th anniversary of our landmark book 'Deep Adaptation'.

Read: https://t.co/xyKVgkk5IS

https://t.co/fXBxDVA0qZ

[Caroline Lucas @CarolineLucas]

This is essential reading for all policy makers - and it’s exactly what many of us have been warning about for years. Our current economic model is simply incompatible with a safe & secure future. We can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks https://t.co/wvJ9F8rggg

[Rupert Read 🌍 🔥 @GreenRupertRead]

NEW: "This is a report which, unlike predecessors, can’t be waved away as ‘overstatement’ from ‘usual suspects’..."

I co-wrote this with @CarolineLucas to help you understand the implications for you of the Government’s suppressed security assessment 👇

https://t.co/XuyFKZXBeP

[Danica Priest🦇🦎🦇🦎🍃💚🍃 @DanicaPriest]

⚠️Planning bill update ⚠️
as expected Labour was whipped into voting down every amendment that would protect nature from this bill. They rejected the most basic fluffing protections for endangered species. They even rejected saving chalk streams!
Now it goes back to the Lords

[Canary @TheCanaryUK]

💚 It’s been another stellar week for @TheGreenParty @ZackPolanski and a lot of that is down to their social media strategy. That’ll have the British political establishment scratching their heads... Cody Dahler is back #green #ukpolitics #greenparty #socialmedia #hope

[Richard Murphy @RichardJMurphy]

There will be a lot of nonsense talked about government borrowing today https://t.co/M9W52gRrv2

[Relearning Economics @RelearningEcon]

Balanced budget rules sound responsible.

In reality, they make recessions worse.

A thread.
🧵1/12

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Nigel Farage is the biggest charlatan in British political history.

And here's what his constitutents in Clacton really think:

[Adam Brichto @AdamBrichto]

This is what bold politics looks like. Take it to Farage’s doorstep…

[Britain People @Britain_People]

🔴Nigel Farage wants to get rid of the NHS and replace it with US style insurance.

Can you afford $50,000 for a broken leg, $500,000 for a new heart, or $2,000,000 for cancer ⁉️

#SaveOurNHS @Nigel_Farage

[@AndreaDudding @AndreaDudding]

Dear @jeremycorbyn & @zarahsultana if you want your new party to be successful you have to ditch Thatcher’s economics & the MSM hysteria around debt/deficit & channel Keynes - whatever we can do we can afford
Activists need 2 learn these things to counter “how do we pay for it”

[BONUS🌍 @TheDisproof]

The "No farmers No food" account is controlled by James Melville, a human induced climate change denier who aligns with fossil fuel lobby groups & spreads disinformation. He manipulates farmers to ignore the harmful impacts of rapid climate change they personally experience.

[BONUS🌍 @TheDisproof]

Remember that podcast hosts are rarely experts on climate. Here I dissect Joe Rogan's misleading claims on climate change in his conversation with Bernie Sanders. Part 2 coming later in July. See next post for sources.

[Ben Goldsmith @BenGoldsmith]

I don’t mean to diminish the difficulties farmers are experiencing during this time of change in their industry. And I’m not saying that the new Environmental Land Management scheme is perfect, far from it.

But our country is demonstrably an environmental wreckage. Our national parks in particular are an international embarrassment. Our landscapes today would be simply unrecognisable to our great-grandparents, for their colourlessness, their lifelessness, for their silence compared to what earlier generations would have known. Our home is a skeleton of what it once was.

The farming industry rightly points to factors beyond its control for what has happened, unfair market practices, societal expectations, fiscal incentives and so on. But it’s not all society‘s fault; a kind of moral breakdown has undoubtedly occurred in farming, as evidenced too by the abhorrent treatment of livestock on so many (often certified) indoor and outdoor units. An absence of compassion for the natural world and a lack even of basic knowledge of how it works, seems to be pretty much the norm in farming, which is at least in part why our landscapes have come to be how they are.

And all the time the public money kept flowing in the billions and billions. Did the industry really expect that people would not wake up in the end and scramble to save the last scraps of nature before there’s nothing left? Did nobody expect that the public would begin to understand the scale of what has been lost, and the threat that such loss poses to our society, and especially to farming itself? Did farming not anticipate any kind of reckoning?

A seven year transition away from the opioid drip of unconditional subsidies to a new system based upon the principle of public money for public good does not seem at all unreasonable to me. People on all sides of this discussion wish to see a bigger budget for ELM. And everyone would like for it to have been perfect from the get-go, but this transition is a world first, and a complicated thing to build and get right. Hence the long transition period. Officials are doing a good job generally.

Perhaps if farming industry representatives hadn’t spent all this time denigrating the very idea of ELM, campaigning against it and implicitly persuading farmers that they need not worry because the changes would never actually happen, we’d be in a better place now.

Nevertheless, I believe ELM will work out; that it will usher in an era of nature recovery on a grand scale without negatively impacting food production. I’m optimistic too that a new emphasis on public goods alongside food production will provide a pathway to greater social and economic stability, especially in agriculturally marginal landscapes, as people diversify their incomes and do other things alongside food production. In fact I think other rich world countries will end up copying what we’re doing in England.

[Ben Goldsmith @BenGoldsmith]

On Labour’s announcement of a broad, national conservation on land use… I think you’ve got this one wrong @_RobbieMoore. Labour is doing good here and Conservatives ought to support it.

It was the last Conservative government that originally committed to launch a national consultation on land use. It was an excellent idea then and it’s good news that Labour is following through on that pledge.

This is not about central planning. Taxpayers spend a fortune supporting farming, infrastructure development, housing, nature recovery and all kinds of activities across all of our land.

With so many demands on a finite amount of land, it makes perfect sense that we as a society have some idea of the outcomes we wish to achieve and where.

For example, regulations and incentives relating to scarce top quality agricultural land ought be geared towards farmers sustainably growing food for people, rather than using them for bogus ‘green’ energy crops, solar arrays, feed for factory farmed livestock, golf courses etc.

And in our least productive landscapes, such as those within our national parks, where the land is simply unsuitable for productive farming (just 1-2% of our food is grown on the least productive 20% of the land) incentivising a grand, farmer-led nature recovery makes perfect sense.

Most pressingly, we need our landscapes once again to absorb heavy rainfall, storing it, cleaning it and releasing it slowly through the year. Sponge landscapes rich in nature are vital to our national wellbeing, helping to insulate us from flash flooding, summer drought and even wildfire.

Overwhelmingly our society wants nature and wildlife back. People understand how desperately depleted those are in Britain. Prioritising nature in landscapes not suited to high agricultural productivity makes perfect sense - and many farmers in those landscapes stand ready to take charge in delivering this.

I really don’t think Conservatives do themselves any favours standing as the party of anti-nature, and mobbing Labour for fulfilling pledges that indeed were made by the last Conservative government.

[Zoe Broughton @cameraZoe]

"The obsession with growth is insane. We live on a planet with finite resources....We are one species, on one planet, with one last chance to sort it out and we've got to do it now!" says @ChrisGPackham
@XRebellionUK
#HeathrowExpansion
@StopHeathrowExp

[LBC @LBC]

“About 70% of the flights in this country are taken by just 15% of the population.”

With Rachel Reeves expected to back a third Heathrow runway, @GeorgeMonbiot says it’s time for a ‘frequent flyer tax’ instead.