In many cases it already is. There are wildlife crimes, tree preservation orders, pollution and emission limits… Jersey laws, UK laws, constitutional requirements, EU directives.
Unfortunately, in many cases, the laws are not enforced. People get away with wicked, egregious obliteration all the time. Nobody does anything because there appears to be no victim. Indeed, if you value ‘progress’ — like office blocks, travel, and increased GDP — there appear to be benefits.
But even when people are caught, and prosecutions won, very often the fines are tiny. A few quid, even a few thousand quid, are petty cash when…
Planned degrowth is much better than an uncontrolled economic crash. You can’t have affordable homes in the same market as people sitting on overpriced property goldmines. Cooling the local economy solves problems, but the rich don’t get any richer. We need to choose.
How does a doctor tell their patient that they’re too fat? How does a therapist suggest we look at our greediness? How should a partner tell their other half that they are selfish? These are difficult conversations — initial reactions can be quite bad — but sometimes they are necessary.
‘Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.’ This quote, first printed in 1973, has since been picked up and repeated by David Attenborough and others. The Limits to Growth report was published in 1972.
Who really runs the world, and makes it so awful for the rest of us? Is it actually just us, ‘following orders,’ earning a living, doing what’s expected? Or is it the fear of what might happen if we questioned the whole thing, said no, and actually stopped?
Is there really a shadowy cabal of elites who think they own us, who run the world, and who manage everything for their profit and our subjugation? You can find people who firmly believe that there is, and that no real social or environmental progress will be made until they are exposed and overthrown.
In our workplaces, we certainly come across people who own the company, who run the company and who manage its sections. They enforce dress codes, working hours and what they see as acceptable behaviour. …
Our everyday minds are conditioned by everyday affairs, ego, stress and tiredness. We are not well equipped to look at longer term, serious, and irreversible problems.
When we think about the climate crisis and the sixth mass extinction a range of emotions comes up. As an island society we have limited land space and an awful lot of sea around us. The competing pressures for development, for homes, for comfort, for making money and for showing it off, mean that our wild spaces and native habitats — our life support systems — are under ever-increasing, heartless pressure from all sides. To get anywhere, to do anything, it seems that we need a car or a plane before we even start.
Yet we know the ice is…
The choice we face when we consider business-as-usual for next year, and the decade after that, is very stark. If we carry on as we are, we lock in the certain deaths of most people we know, most children yet to be born, and most of the species alive today.
The secretary-general of the United Nations is hosting a Climate Action Summit on 23 September. World leaders are invited to New York to present concrete and realistic plans. ‘I want to hear about how we are going to stop the increase in emissions by 2020, and dramatically reduce emissions to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century,’ he has said. These plans must describe the complete transformation of economies — without increasing economic inequality — to stabilise the global climate and reduce the rate of species extinction.
The science is clear that the global economy must produce a right-angle change in the…
Our world is so tame. If you don’t put yourself out there, nothing much happens. If you do, there may be real danger, but you will never feel more alive.
Once, for a few precious days and nights, my partner and I hiked and camped high on Dartmoor, far away from campsites. We had nothing other than what we carried on our backs and what the moor provided. We collected water from streams, cooked our lentils and rice on a tiny camping stove and slept on flat ground where we chose. We tied a string between trees to dry our clothes and were visited by wild horses who roam free up there.
Afterwards I wrote, ‘Our third day on the moor dawned bright and sunny with a breeze… The effect…
Why are we still pursuing the long-past dreams of armed colonialists, top-hatted industrialists, and greedy bankers?
When someone mentioned a few years ago that the Industrial Revolution started 200 years ago, I was struck with the thought, ‘Gosh, I have lived through more than a quarter of the Industrial Revolution!’ That means that when I think back to the racing cars on St Ouen’s beach when I was a child, to tractors pulling ploughs followed by hoards of gulls, industrialism was young compared to now.
We are living through one of the biggest experiments that humans have ever undertaken on the Earth. Is it possible to grow the same monocrop in the same fields year after…
You cannot walk without ancestors. Each of us has a lineage that goes right back to the very start. And now we are the only ones left alive. It all depends on what we do in the next 18 months.
‘Walk like you have 3,000 ancestors walking behind you.’ People say that is an African proverb. Linda Hogan wrote, ‘Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.’
It’s always a moving moment on ‘Who do you think you are?’ when this week’s subject gets to walk along a path that their four-times great grandmother would have walked regularly. At my age, I can remember a lot of people who are now dead — my grandparents and my…
It is not enough to declare a climate emergency: policy changes need to follow. For these to be welcomed by the public — as they should be — a concerted, government-led education program will be needed. This is what we mean by ‘Tell the Truth.’ It means unpicking all those years of convenient greedy lies.
Last week the Government of Jersey broke its silence about the thinking going on behind the scenes since the States declared a climate emergency early in May. A thirty-page PDF was published on gov.je on Wednesday and a full-page report on its main points appeared in the JEP the next day.
It is very welcome to see that the scale of the matter seems to have been grasped, and that something is actually going on. I don’t have space here to go through the proposals in detail; I can only make one or two overarching points.
First, the science has…
How long can we allow them to bumble along, keeping everything exactly as it is? Even the Prince of Wales says we have just eighteen months ‘to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need.’
The first public consultations for the Island Plan 2021–2030 took place last week. The Government of Jersey has produced an expensive 52-page booklet called Strategic issues and options and numerous large-scale graphics reproducing its pages and diagrams.
Unfortunately, the whole publicity thrust started in the middle of the discussion, not at the beginning. The meeting I was at was well attended by local architects, property developers and property owners. The ‘strategic options’ up for discussion suited them well. Where will they be allowed to build the 6,670 new homes that it has been identified the market will absorb? ‘Look, it’s…
Nigel Jones
All living things are intimately and very snugly connected together, and we always have been.
