John's wheelbarrow

How a bunch of mates bought some land together

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 10:01:00 +0000

Have you ever found yourself sitting around with a group of friends saying “wouldn't it be great to buy a block of land together in the bush?” For years, my life partner, Jemma and I found ourselves having the same dinner party conversation, yearning for something more than nuclear family life in the suburbs. Eventually, we decided that we should actually do something, or else stop talking about it. This is a story about what unfolded. I say ‘a’ story, because each of our co-conspirators has a different one as our lives have come together to share the exciting journey and our connection to the beautiful place that we call ‘Black Bulga’.

Our first step in taking this idea seriously (sometime in 2006) was to organise a Sunday lunch with our friends who we had been discussing the idea with. Out of that lunch came an agreement to spend a weekend away together in the country to kick the idea around. We were explicit that there was no pressure, and no expectation that this group of people would do anything together other than exploring a conversation.

After two separate weekends of staying in lovely farm-houses, eating delicious food, drinking too much wine and traipsing around the countryside looking at properties, it was clear that this was a group of people with very different ideas and expectations. Out of the seven of us that spent those weekends together, only three of us seemed to be looking for similar things.

Michael, Jemma and I kept the conversation going. We shared a common connection to the Hunter Valley and over the course of the next couple of years, spent a number of weekends exploring the foothills of the Barrington Tops World Heritage Area. We read books on intentional communities, visited as many communities as we could find, reached out to friends of friends who lived in the Barrington Tops area, and began to get a sense of what kind of properties were out there. All the while we kept floating the conversation with other friends who we thought might be interested in the idea.

James, Steve and Naomi waking up at Black Bulga

Our friends James and Danielle decided to come down from Brisbane for a weekend of exploring places and ideas. They both had Newcastle roots and had a long-term dream of rural landsharing and intentional community. James has spent much of his life as an environmental campaigner and activist educator and had a strong vision of creating an activist training centre. Dan works as a communications professional with a passion for visual arts, and she was excited about the creative potential of this kind of project. Other friends dipped in and out of the conversation over this time but by the start of 2008 our group of three had grown to five.

Jemma and I moved up to Newcastle to be closer to her family when Rosa, our first daughter was born. We were infected with the madness of first-time parents and bought an old terrace house in Cooks Hill, which we proceeded to renovate. During winter, when we had no bathroom, our friends Geoff and Deb came to our rescue and offered hot baths and warm soups. I had known Geoff for years through his work with the Minerals Policy Institute and Greenpeace, but it was through this period that our friendship deepened and we got to know Deb. Geoff had just completed his Phd into how to develop a ‘just transition’ away from coal dependence to sustainability in the Hunter Valley, and Deb was embarking on her own Phd, exploring the challenges of educating boys. Over the course of many lovely evening discussions (in between having hot baths and soothing a newborn baby) we discovered that they were also seriously interested in the idea of co-owning a block of land in the Hunter Valley. Our group of five grew to seven.

It was during this time that Jemma and I met a young carpenter by the name of Steve who was passionate about sustainable building. We asked him to help us with some of the structural work on our renovation and Steve and I spent a few days working together. It turns out that Steve shared a similar dream of buying land together with like-minded people, but he felt he was a long way off being ready for that kind of project.

Some time in 2009, after Jemma and I were back in Sydney, our group of seven spent a weekend up at Wangat Lodge, near Barrington Tops to explore the land-sharing idea and to look at properties. We shared our dreams, hopes and fears, discussed criteria for land, and explored the kind of legal arrangements that we would need to do this kind of project. By this time, Jemma, Michael and I must have looked at every rural property for sale in the entire district, and the local real estate agent was starting to get pretty weary of us. But all of a sudden we found ourselves looking at a property that ticked all of the boxes. It was magnificent – stunning views, a creek, cycling distance from Dungog and the trainline to Sydney and Newcastle, it had a six bedroom house, large shed and two rental cabins already built. The only problem was that it cost close to a million dollars.

We quickly figured out the maximum that each of us could afford and worked up a business plan. We needed 16 people to make it work financially. We put the word out to our closest networks. James called a friend and colleague from Brisbane. After hearing about the place and who was involved, John (Jmac) pretty much said he was ‘in’ over the phone. Another friend (James A) from Sydney did the same thing. I called Steve, who by this time had become a good friend, and he came up to check the place out. Geoff and Deb reached out to their friends Matt and Sarah who also came up to see the property.

The Black Bulga community at our first permaculture workshop

All of a sudden we had reached critical mass – we had a vision, a great group of people and fantastic block of land. We scrambled to make it happen. We put up $2,000 each and engaged a lawyer from Northern NSW who had experience setting up rural landsharing projects. We started negotiations to buy the property. Our dream was about to become reality. In our minds, Jemma and I had moved to the land and built our dream house already…until we got gazumped. While we were rushing to get our constitution in order, somebody else bought the property from right under our nose. It was gut wrenching.

In the weeks after we had found the property, we had rapidly turned an idea into a serious project with a clear vision, a legal structure and a business plan – but with no land and a great deal of disappointment. We regrouped and kept looking.

Without a real place to ground the project, it became increasingly difficult to maintain momentum. Intellectually, it seemed far more sensible to develop the group, the legal structure, the plan and a clear set of criteria before finding a block of land, but practically speaking, it was all starting to feel a bit too abstract. The financial model and the vision was invariably going to be different for each different property, depending on cost of the land and the existing infrastructure. We had a long list of agreed ‘criteria’ but Jemma and I kept on coming back to ‘the vibe’ as being the most important thing.

One of the many swimming holes at Black Bulga.

We soon found another property that seemed to fit the bill and we once again started to develop a vision for how our project could fit that piece of land. We ended up in the awkward situation of having half of our group really keen to buy it and the other half not. We spent a weekend there together (where the Cicadas nearly drove us all mad) which ended with the difficult and quite stressful decision not to buy it. We began to doubt that we’d ever find another place that everyone liked.

In the aftermath of that weekend, I was up late one night scouring the online real estate listings once again and came across a new listing that looked too good to be true. Jemma, Rosa, Deb and I headed up there the next weekend to take a look.

We arrived at the property and the real estate agent took us straight to one of the most beautiful swimming holes we’d ever seen at the confluence of the Karuah and Telegherry rivers. And it just got better from there. From the ridge we could see dramatic wilderness for miles and a landscape that invited us to explore the valleys and folds of the rolling mountains. The river flats of rich alluvium had an abundance of water from a gravity fed irrigation system coming out of the neighbouring conservation area. And the rivers…oh the glorious rivers…where you could swim with your mouth open and drink deeply of the crystal clear waters.

Jemma, Deb and Rosa on our first visit to the property.

As we left the sun drenched ridge on that first visit, we knew we had found the place we had been looking for. An eagle soared overhead, and Rosa grinned a delicious blackberry stained grin as the wallabies hopped away through the paddock. And so we began the journey to becoming custodians of the land that we have come to know and love as Black Bulga.

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This is part 1 in a 2 part series. The next installment (the first 2 years) is still a work-in-progress.

We are currently looking for new members to join the Black Bulga community. If you’re interested in exploring the idea, please email me at hepburn.john[at]gmail.com

You can also check out some more photos at www.blackbulga.org.au

Will Australia's carbon price stop new coal plants?

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 13:48:00 +0000

On Sunday evening, after reading the Dr Seuss classic “If I ran the zoo” to my three year old daughter, I sat on the couch, fortified myself with a strong drink, and began to read the Treasury modelling on the carbon price (I know, I know, it’s an exciting life).

After reading the projections for the likely impact of the carbon price between now and 2050, I began to wonder if Dr Seuss actually might work at Treasury. While there aren’t any ten-footed lions, Elephant-Cats or Tufted Mazurkas, there are certainly plenty of heroic assumptions, interspersed with ludicrous notions.

According to Treasury, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will somehow become commercially viable around 2030, triggering a large-scale investment in coal with CCS and gas with CCS. It is a bit like predicting in 1990 how many betamax video machines will be sold in 2011 (except that betamax videos actually worked). They might as well have assumed that someone will invent a free energy machine. Seriously, it is becoming increasingly clear that even the coal industry have given up on CCS. The dream of ‘clean coal’ is slowly but surely collapsing under the weight of its own hubris as people actually start to think through what is required to make it work.

Treasury recognise that the long term direction for both coal and gas prices is up (notwithstanding an anticipated short term reduction in coal prices as supply catches up with demand) but they seem to have substantially under-estimated the costs of CCS and under-estimated the extent to which the cost of renewable energy is falling.

The modelling also assumes that no new conventional coal power station will be built in Australia, and it is clear that Julia Gillard and Martin Ferguson are planning on using this as an excuse to avoid their election promise to implement an emissions performance standard.

I asked the PM about this at a breakfast on Monday and pointed out to her that the Deloitte modelling of Electricity Generation Investment (commissioned by DRET) concluded that a carbon price of at least $70/tonne would be required to rule out new coal in WA, where three proposed new coal plants have environmental approvals. She said that she was more optimistic than me about the impact of a carbon price on directing the future of energy investment.

It is true that she is more optimistic than me about the impact of a $23 carbon price – much more. As far as I can tell, the only thing that is stopping three new coal power stations being built in WA is a strange combination of State Government policy incoherence and an increasingly convoluted commercial stoush between Lanco Infratech (the Indian buyer of Ric Stowe’s Griffin coal mine) and their customers over coal supply contracts. A low carbon price of only $23/tonne simply isn’t going to rule out coal in WA, even though their poor quality coal makes WA coal plants among the dirtiest in the country.

Similarly in Victoria, the proposed new HRL coal power station continues to stagger on – albeit without finance from the major Australian banks. The big question is whether or not Ferguson will give HRL $100Million of taxpayer money as promised (by the Howard Government). Mind you, it would be quite embarrassing to be publically subsidising a polluting coal plant immediately after the introduction of the carbon price package – so no doubt the Government will be looking closely at how they can get out of the contract. It shouldn’t be too hard given HRL’s record of missing deadlines.

As for the coalition, their climate and energy policy is a wretched pile of nonsense and despite claims of being interested in ‘direct action’ it is becoming abundantly clear that they are only really interested in ‘direct opposition’ to whatever the Government is saying. The only vaguely good thing that can be said about their approach is that it is so incoherent and destabilising that it is likely to undermine investor confidence in both coal and gas for some time to come, regardless of any actual regulation (This obviously isn’t a sensible policy approach but anything that delays fossil fuel investments is arguably a good thing as the price of renewables continues to fall). Abbot continues to play a high stakes game of wrecking the consensus for climate action for his own short-term political interests – without heed to the costs. It will no doubt define his legacy and it is difficult to imagine it being well regarded by those who follow.

Ruling out new coal power stations should fit perfectly with Abbot’s “Direct Action” approach, and it should fit perfectly with Gillards pre-election promise to “rule out new dirty coal power stations”. The fact that it seems so difficult for both of them seems more a reflection of the political/ideological aversion to putting the words ‘no’ and ‘coal’ together in the same sentence, rather than any rational policy objections.

We still need an emissions performance standard to rule out new polluting power stations.

New coal plant approved in Victora

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:34:00 +0000

The approval by the Victorian EPA on Friday of a new coal power station is set to create yet another headache for Julia Gillard. In the leadup to the election, she promised that "We will never allow a highly inefficent and dirty power station to be built again in Australia”.

With a projected emissions intensity of 0.8tonnes of CO2/MWh (almost double the OECD average), the HRL power station in the Latrobe Valley is clearly a highly inefficient and dirty power station. So presumably, either there will be some kind of federal intervention to block it, or Gillard will break an election promise.

But even if the political system fails, as it so commonly does, the plant may not go ahead for purely financial reasons. The front page of Saturday’s The Age ran the headline “Big banks ‘no’ to coal plant”, revealing that all four of the major banks have stated that they are not involved in the project. This means that HRL is likely to struggle to arrange finance, even with $150million in direct government handouts.

The fact that none of the big four banks is involved in HRL is no doubt partly a reflection of the individual project, which is highly speculative and financially marginal, but also reflects the wider sentiment that coal is slowly but surely having it’s social license withdrawn. While none of the big four banks have categorically ruled out financing new coal power stations, they know that they face significant reputation risks from being associated with the coal sector.

So, while HRL has received at least partial approval, there is still a long road to travel before they can obtain finance and start construction. Even then, it is likely that the plant would be the focus of a sustained campaign of direct action to physically stop it from being built.

As usual, regulators are running to catch up to community expectations.

[First published on Crikey]

Probability and Responsibility at Fukushima

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Wed, 11 May 2011 03:53:00 +0000

In the long run, the least likely event will occur. Such is the nature of probability, and the nature of risk.

The environmental movement have been talking about this for some time now. It has been the basis of much of the opposition to nuclear energy and releasing genetically engineered organisms into the environment for the last several decades.

The standard formulation of ‘risk’ is that it is a function of the probability of an event occurring and the magnitude of the hazard. From the viewpoint of technological optimism and managerialism, the seductiveness of a very low probability often leads people to discount the magnitude of the hazard. This distortion is amplified even further by the fact that the profits of success remain privatised, wheras the responsibility for large-scale hazards is often socialised, with Governments and taxpayers picking up the tab.

Insurance companies are reluctant to underwrite nuclear power stations for the simple reason that, although the probability of catastrophe may be low, the potential magnitude and cost of a meltdown is staggeringly large. The only reason that nuclear power stations have been able to be built is because Governments have provided insurance and have limited the financial liability of operators.

A similar dynamic is at play regarding carbon capture and storage. Private companies will no doubt be willing to profit from storing CO2 underground, but nobody would be seriously willing to invest in it unless they are exempt from liability in the case that things go seriously pear-shaped . That is why the federal Government passed legislation that exempts companies from long term responsibility for storage of CO2 and places it instead in the lap of taxpayers.

Coming back to Fukushima, Japanese taxpayers will undoubtedly pick up a significant portion of the cost of managing the crisis, which is expected to require serious and ongoing management for many decades. If TEPCO were to be held fully responsible for the entire long term costs of the disaster, they would probably go insolvent. In a capitalist system, this ought to happen, otherwise we perpetuate the endemic problem of short-term and sociopathic behaviour on the part of corporations who operate in the knowledge that they’ll never really be held accountable for the negative consequences of their operations.

But it is not only responsibility for the financial costs that need to be considered. What about responsibility for the actual physical work and the related personal risks?

I’ve read various news reports about TEPCO’s difficulty in recruiting workers to help manage the crisis. Most of their staff have reached or exceeded the allowable radiation exposure limits so the the company is having to find new recruits. Some of these people obviously are technical experts, while others are labourers needed to spray cooling water and perform other physical operations.

At Chernobyl, hundreds of peasant workers trooped in to the reactor with little or no knowledge of the danger they were being exposed to. Fortunately, this can’t happen in Japan. Instead, TEPCO will have to pay enough danger money to enable them to recruit a steady stream of workers who are willing to take the risk of subjecting themselves to radiation in the hope that the money is worth it.

It seems to me that it is these workers who are actually the ones who are really taking the responsibility for Fukushima. They are the ones who will live with the consequences. And I think it is useful to ask, who SHOULD be doing this dangerous work? Who should be taking direct, personal and physical responsibility for the crisis?

Surely the people who have benefitted from the previous profitability of Fukushima, the people who own it and built it, should now be responsible for managing the downside? This means the Directors and shareholders. But what would that look like in practice?

How is this for a thought experiment…what if there was a kind of conscription, where the names of directors and shareholders were put into a hat, to be randomly selected for frontline roles helping to cool the reactor? What about staff at the banks that financed the plant? Should they be in the conscription pool as well? Or people like Andrew Bolt, Ziggy Switkowski and the other strong advocates of nuclear power?

Or should it just be left to working class Japanese people who have no connection with the plant but who happen to need the money?

Fukushima should not only cause us to reconsider the risk of nuclear power, it should also cause us to reflect on the nature of corporate responsibility – or irresponsibility as the case may be.

September poem

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:45:00 +0000

a cheeky little drop
moist, bold and refreshing
it cleanses the palette like an exquisite wine
bitter and familiar like lager
warm and flat, cold and sparkling
it is the essence of home
yet carries untold mysteries from afar
warm and comforting
harsh and unforgiving
it brings new hope and ancient fears
I welcome it into my life each morning
a breath of fresh air
the sea breeze.

Climate politics at the Pacific Island Forum

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:49:00 +0000

Pacific leaders are meeting in Cairns today for the Pacific Island Forum. In recent years the agenda has been dominated by issues of regional stability including the intervention in the Solomons and more recently the troubling political events in Fiji. But with the forum happening in Australia for the first time in over a decade, and climate change at the top of the international political agenda, other issues are set to dominate.

Pacific Islands are literally on the front line of climate change. The Prime Minister of Tuvalu has raised the prospect of having to relocate their entire country because of rising sea levels and other climate impacts. The Association of Small Island States (AOSIS), which includes the Pacific Islands, has become the moral conscience of the international climate negotiations, set to conclude in Copenhagen in December. Their calls for developed countries such as Australia to cut emissions by over 40% within the next decade put Australia’s low and highly conditional target (5-25%) into stark relief.

Australia too is vulnerable to climate change, but it is expected that Kevin Rudd will carefully manage relations during the Forum to keep any strong climate statements out of the Forum Communiqué. There will be some heavy diplomatic manoeuvrings going on behind the scenes to keep climate of the agenda and real emission cuts off the table.

Australia’s growing coal exports coupled with low emissions targets and the relentless push for loopholes and exemptions in the international climate negotiations put the Rudd Government’s climate position on a collision course with the Pacific. While our neighbours are fighting for their survival, Australia is rapidly doubling our coal export capacity and entrenching our position as the world’s biggest carbon pusher.

Despite all of the wrangling and economic fear mongering over the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, any reductions in greenhouse pollution through even a 25% target (the very top end of the Government’s proposal) will be undone many times over by the increased coal exports from NSW and Queensland.

Climate change remains confusing so long as the debate continues to be fixed on numbers, statistics and complex economic instruments. But when you come back to the bottom line, it’s really quite simple. We need to stop putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. To do this we need to stop digging up and burning fossil fuels - and coal is the biggest problem. If we are burning more coal (regardless of where it is burnt), we are making climate change worse.

Having grown up in Central Queensland, I understand the role that coal plays in Queensland and indeed in the national psyche. My father spent his entire working life in the coal industry and as a graduate engineer I spent my first few years out of university building equipment for coal mines. But time moves on. Computers replaced the abacus, mobile phones replaced carrier pidgeons, and renewable energy will replace coal.

It will take a serious effort to make the transition from coal to clean energy in a way that supports coal dependent communities and workers, but the economic impact of moving away from coal will be far less than most people imagine. In Queensland, tourism employs far more people than the entire mining sector and will be hard hit by climate change. But perhaps the biggest surprise is the royalty payments.

This year, the Queensland Government received around $1.5 billion in royalty payments from the coal industry. In the same breath, $1.3 billion of public money was spent on coal infrastructure – 90% of the total royalty payments. So much for private enterprise. And if you factor in the costs of the negative health and environmental impacts of coal mining the net economic contribution of the industry starts to look even less appealing.

We need to choose whether we want to continue to be a quarry economy, or if we are ready to move into the twenty first century and embrace the renewable energy revolution that is slowly but surely building momentum. At the moment, Rudd and Bligh are still backing the coal industry, with only a token hedge on renewables.

Climate politics in Australia is a struggle over vested interests. For their part, Pacific countries do not have a domestic fossil fuel lobby running full-page ads in national newspapers threatening job losses if we take serious action on climate change. They don’t have a greenhouse mafia whose web of influence entraps politicians at all levels of Government. It means that they can speak the truth about climate change, and call for what is actually required to protect both their future and ours.

In the absence of real honesty or leadership from our own political leaders, the Pacific are our moral conscience on climate change.

The power of doubt

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:20:00 +0000

I caught a snippet of a beautiful poem whilst listening to the radio the other day. On being right. And being certain. And on the beauty and importance of doubt.

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never bloom in the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard, and trampled like a yard.
But doubts and loves dig up the world
Like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined house once stood.

Yehudah Amichai
.

Climate of civil disobedience

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:47:00 +0000

First published on Crikey's environment blog - "Rooted"

“If you disobey a police directive, there is a risk you will be arrested and charged with trespass,” I explained gently to countless groups of people as they lined the front of Parliament House yesterday.

Around two and half thousand people of all ages and from all over Australia gathered to encircle federal Parliament on the first sitting day of 2009 to demand urgent action on climate change. It was the culmination of the three day ‘climate action summit’ which saw over 150 community climate change groups meet for the first time to develop a national campaign strategy.

Some faces showed thinly disguised fear at the prospect of disobeying police instructions. Others had travelled for hours to link hands all the way around Parliament House and nothing was going to stop them. “But it’s our Parliament! – there’s no way the police can stop this many people!”

After the Kevin Rudd’s appalling capitulation to the big polluters and his announcement of a pathetic 5% emissions reduction target, the organisers of the Climate Action Summit applied to The Usher of the Black Rod for permission to form a human chain all the way around Parliament. It was to be a symbolic protest about the capture of our politicians by the big polluters and the need for urgent action in response to the climate emergency.

The request was denied. We said that we were going to do it anyway. They said they couldn’t let us do it because it would create a precedent and that we had to stay on the protest lawn out the front. We said we were going to do it anyway. They offered us a compromise to form a chain across the front of Parliament. We said we were going to do it anyway, and that if they wanted to arrest people we would co-operate fully to help minimise disruption. So when we arrived at Parliament yesterday morning, it was a standoff.

The crowd started to gather from around 7:30am. A hot Tuesday morning in Canberra, outside of school holidays…it was a big ask. We were hoping for at least a thousand people – just enough to stretch the 1.6km distance. But the stream of red just kept on coming. Busses from Sydney, Melbourne, and around NSW, people on bikes, pedestrians, a constant stream of red shirts and red banners until we had up to two and half thousand people milling around the front of Parliament.

Mums, dads, grandparents, young children, babies, teenagers, from all walks of life and from all over Australia. It was truly inspiring to see the diversity of the climate change movement that had gathered to raise their voices. The police didn’t stand a chance.

When the call went out, the crowd slowly started moving from the front of Parliament around the sides. Some walked boldly, heads held high as though they owned the place (which we do). For others, their trepidation slowly turned to grins of delight as they saw the police step aside and let us pass. Ten minutes later, the two ends of the line joined up at the far end of Parliament – mission accomplished! Cheers went up around the perimeter. You could tell people could sense of their own power. Over two thousand people had stared down the politicians, bureaucrats and police and had participated in civil disobedience to stand up for something they believe in. They did it peacefully and creatively, together with their friends and family, and they had a wonderful time doing it.

If you’ve ever been involved in direct action protest with your community, you will know that it is one of the most empowering and inspiring things you can ever do. And if you’ve studied history, you will know that we owe many of our basic rights and freedoms to people doing civil disobedience.

Climate change poses such a profound threat to our future, and our Government is failing so comprehensively, that people are left with little choice but to start taking direct action themselves, and to start building a social movement to turn politics on it’s head. These past few days have been an important step in that journey. And it’s only going to grow from here.

Escalating climate action in 2009

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:41:00 +0000

Opening plenary address by John Hepburn to Australia's Climate Action Summit, Canberra, 31st Jan 2009.

Firstly I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners of this land, the Ngunnawal people. I’d also like to thank the organisers of the summit, who I know have been working tirelessly for months to make this event happen.

I’m going to talk briefly about where we have come to, and what I think are some of the key lessons from the climate movement thus far. And then I’m going to outline some thoughts for where we need to head over the next couple of years.

This is an important moment in history. This summit, at the start of the 2009 Parliament, marks the failure of the Australian political system to respond to climate change. A Government, elected with a mandate to take action on climate change, has comprehensively failed to take meaningful action. Both major parties are failing.

Yes we need action from within the corporate sector. Yes we need bureaucrats lobbying for incremental gains. Yes we need more research into the science. But far beyond all of that, we need a movement that is going to make action on climate change a political necessity. We need a movement that will make it impossible for Kevin Rudd to stand up and announce a 5% emissions reduction target. And we need a movement that will make it impossible for a corporate CEO to stand up in public and call for delays.

It is up to us.

Take a look around this auditorium. These are the people who are taking leadership on climate change. It’s you. It’s the person sitting next to you. And it’s the people that you’ll spend the next few days working with to create plans for what may be the most important struggle in human history.

There’s been a lot of talk about the failure of the climate movement. A lot of soul searching, a lot of despair, and a lot of hope. Looking back on 2008, did the climate movement fail?

On one level, sure, we failed. The Rudd Government caved in to the big polluters. We have an emissions trading scheme that will do nothing to reduce emissions, and that will lock in the right to pollute so that it will be much more difficult and costly to cut emissions in future. More than anything, the CPRS is designed to uphold the right to pollute and to enable compensation if this supposed right it denied.

The white paper is a profound failure. But is it a failure of the movement? I don’t think so. I’ve been getting a sense that people think we failed to protect something that we had won previously. But I don’t agree. When we say to the media, that Rudd has betrayed his promise, it’s politics. Yes he betrayed his promise, but if anyone actually thought his election promise was for anything more than 5-15% cuts then I think they’d be guilty of optimism.

But after 10 years of Howard it was always going to be difficult to dampen the optimism for Rudd to take action on climate change. As a result, there was always a risk that the movement would stagnate while we gave Rudd the opportunity to fail. Rudd was never going to deliver what is required. A Labor Government was always going to be just as, if not more beholden to the vested interests of the big polluters than the coalition.

We didn’t build our power after the election, we sat back and let it wane. We didn’t sustain pressure on MP’s even though we knew it was required. We didn’t diminish the power of the vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, we allowed it to flourish.

In August, when the Business Council started calling for stabilisation by 2020, we should have had 50 people at their office the next day, serving them an eviction notice from this country for acting against the public interest. When the chairman of BHP came out and slammed the Government for threatening the economy, the headquarters of BHP should have been occupied the next day, talk back lines should have been running hot and the letters pages brimming with vitriol from people angry that a corporate leader could so openly threaten our future. Instead, we rolled with the punches.

Basic Political economy tells us that climate change is a struggle over vested interests. The Government will do what is required on climate change, when the costs of inaction outweigh the costs of action. At the moment, the vested interests in the coal, gas, aluminium, cement, steel and oil industries are more powerful than we are. Our challenge is to build our own power, while dismantling theirs.

In terms of this power equation, 2008 was a year where the big polluters were forced to show some of the power that we have known they have always had. From our side, with a few notable exceptions we failed to build our power and we didn’t express that power that we have until after the announcement was made.

So what did we do well in 2008? Two moments stand out in my mind.

There was this great lobbying meeting where someone from one of the big NGO’s had this really great briefing paper that made a really clear argument about the need for action, and they were really passionate, and they had done this great research report showing how we can achieve at least 25% reductions in greenhouse emissions by 2020 based on 1990 levels. And they made this really compelling case and they were lobbying this MP who said – ‘If I’m not going to lose my seat over it, I couldn’t give a shit’.

So they went to climate camp instead.

On 17th July, over a thousand people took part in an act of civil disobedience to peacefully block the Newcastle coal port for a day. We stopped coal trains going through to the port for the entire day, over sixty people were arrested and charged with trespass, and a hundreds of people had one of the most inspiring and rewarding days of their lives. When I got back to camp after the action, people just had this glow about them. And these big beaming smiles.

During the debrief, people were saying that they had been trying to stop the expansion of the coal industry for years but had never been part of anything like this – and when is the next one so I can bring all of my friends. People felt empowered because they refused to do what they were told. They stood up for what they believed in. And by the end of the day they had helped delay thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions. And through the media, they had told a powerful story to the rest of Australia that climate change is too serious and too urgent for people to just sit back and watch.

And for me, the really interesting thing about climate camp was that the next day, a group of three students from Brisbane, who had never done any kind of direct action before, decided that they wanted to shut down the coal rail line again. They had a meeting at 11 o’clock to decide what they were going to do, and then around 1 o’clock they jumped over the fence, waved down a coal train, tied themselves to the tracks and stopped coal transport for another couple of hours.

When that starts happening every week, all over the country. That’s when we’ll start to get real action on climate change.

The second thing that we did really well was the response to the white paper announcement. We created a backlash that was much angrier and much louder than I think anyone expected and I think we made it pretty damned clear to most people in this country that Kevin Rudd caved in to the big polluters. This was an important moment to set us up for this year – and I think we did well. Thanks in part to the brilliant and courageous intervention of three women - George Woods, Annika Dean and Naomi Hodgeson - who stood up in the national press club and said “No, it’s not good enough”, and told it how it was.

The kind of courage and determination that these three women showed is what we need for this movement to create the change that we need. When we have thousands of people standing up all over the country, and showing the courage and conviction of these three women, we’ll start to see real action.

So where do we go from here? We need to do four things: Polarise, Organise, Escalate, and Focus.

1. Polarise

It’s difficult to communicate issues that are not clear-cut. We live in a world of short attention spans and a lot of media noise. If something isn’t clear, it doesn’t cut through. Nobody notices, or if they do, they don’t remember what you said.

For too long our public demands have been vague fluff. The problem has been that our movement demands have largely been constructed by policy wonks rather than by effective communicators. A couple of examples...

80% cuts by 2050 based on 1990 levels has told the story that climate change is something that has to be dealt with in the future, and that it’s only a partial change so some greenhouse pollution is ok. What on earth were we thinking?

Actually, climate change is an emergency. We need urgent action now. Not in 2020 and not by 2050. It’s clear and simple. We need to urgently shut down the entire coal industry and replace it with 100% renewable energy. Starting tomorrow.

Another example is emissions trading. The Government’s Green paper on emissions trading had major flaws. It was clear that the business lobby was exerting far more influence than the environmental movement or the community sector. But, almost without exception, our public positioning was that it needed substantial improvements in several key areas etc. etc.

This told the story that the proposal was disliked by environment groups (which everyone knows will never be satisfied anyway) but that it was basically heading in the right direction. This was profoundly unhelpful.

Try instead…The proposed emissions trading scheme is dangerous, and should be opposed completely. It will enshrine the right to pollute in law and make emissions cuts much more difficult and costly in the future. It is so fundamentally flawed that it cannot be reformed. The Government needs to go back to the drawing board.

I’m going to elaborate on this because it’s probably the most important strategic decision we face over the coming months.

If the emissions trading scheme proposed in the white paper is made into law, it will do virtually nothing to cut greenhouse pollution. The recession will probably result in greater than 5% cuts in emissions. But what the ETS will do, and what the big polluters have fought so hard to get, is that it will turn pollution permits into a right to pollute. The white paper is explicit about this.

This will mean that if any future Government want to cut emissions more than 5%, taxpayers will need to compensate the big polluters for the loss of their right to pollute. This is absolute madness.

Historically high pollution rights should bestow responsibility not rights. These companies should be fined or dismantled, not rewarded.

Then you’ve got the other issues of unlimited banking of permits, the ability to buy as many permits, as we want on the international market – thereby avoiding the need to cut emissions in Australia at all. And then there’s the issue that Richard Dennis from the Australia Institute has been raising for months that the ETS will impose a cap on emissions reductions. So any voluntary action to cut emissions by households or businesses will just mean that the big polluters get to emit more.

The Emissions Trading Scheme is dangerous and should be opposed outright by the entire movement. The day that it goes to the floor of parliament there should be an outcry around the country with protests at every MP’s office demanding that the scheme be scrapped and replaced with real action to cut emissions.

2. Organise

The climate movement has grown in size and diversity and this summit is testament to that. We have over a hundred different groups represented here. We need to share information, share strategy, build our collective power, and then focus that power where it counts.

We need vastly more political power than we have, and to get there we need to organise a lot more people to be active. You don’t need 50% of the population to create a revolution and we won’t need 50% of the population to be active to solve climate change. What we will need is the majority of people supporting change, and we pretty much have this level of public support now. And then we need 5-10% of the population getting actively involved in agitating for change.

We need to broaden our movement. Climate change is not just an environmental issue, it is an issue of survival. Everyone has a stake in it. Church groups, unions, students, farmers, everyone.

We need to create a national network from this summit, and we need to build broad support in the community, as well as creating strong alliances with unions and workers demanding green jobs. We aren’t going to build our power by osmosis. We need to have simple demands, clear arguments and we need to be organising relentlessly in communities to build support for these demands and to build our capacity to apply pressure for change.

3. Escalate

We have to stop being so polite. The earth is dying. We are facing a climate emergency that threatens much of the life on this planet. It’s true. We need to say it like we mean it. And if we aren’t acting like it’s an emergency, how can we expect that anyone else will?

When the laws of society are killing us and threatening our future, we have a moral obligation to ignore those laws and to do what is right. It’s called self-defence. If the worst predictions of runaway global warming are realised, we’re talking about an existential threat and the possibility that this earth may become uninhabitable for humans. Are we going to say to our kids, ‘I tried to do something but the politicians wouldn’t listen?’

What kind of pathetic excuse is that? It’s not good enough. We need to make them listen, and when they don’t, we need to take direct action ourselves. We simply don’t have any choice.

Al Gore and NASA’s James Hansen have both been publicly calling for people to get involved in civil disobedience to stop the construction of new coal plants. Not only do we need to do this, but we need to start getting involved in civil disobedience to close existing coal plants.

In 2008, over 160 people were arrested whilst participating in climate change protests around the country. 160 people decided that they think that action on climate change is more important than whether or not they have a trespass conviction recorded against their name. There are an awful lot more people who understand the science, who feel passionate, and who are willing to take direct action. For those of you that have studied history, you will know that civil disobedience is effective in achieving profound social change. For those of you that have been involved in direct action protests in your community, you will know that it can be one of the most empowering, liberating and beautiful things you can ever do. For those of you that haven’t, this year is your opportunity.

In 2009, we need to see the police having to arrest literally thousands of peaceful protestors to keep a dirty polluting coal plant open. I want to see them having to arrest climate scientists, Clive Hamilton, you, me, Kylie Minogue, Margaret Fulton, Tim Flannery, John Butler, Missy Higgins and my mum.

We need Members of Parliament to have to call the police to manage groups of women and children who have been holding a picnic in their electoral office. We need the AGM’s of coal companies to have to be so heavily guarded against protests that their anti-social industry is exposed to the world.

And we need to do all of this peacefully, in a calm, dignified manner, and to enjoy it so that everyone else in this country sees it and says, “I’m with them”. Direct action for all, not just the radicals.

4. Focus

We need to be building a broad and deep movement for that is demanding fundamental change. As well as that, we need to make sure that we focus the power that we have so that we are as effective as possible in 2009 in the lead up to the Copenhagen meeting in December, as well as in the lead up to 2010.

If we can delay the passage of the emissions trading scheme until 2010, Rudd will be going into an election year with one of his key promises unfulfilled. And the only counter we have to the immense power of the vested interests is the power of the Australian public – and elections remind politicians of that.

So far the ALP have shown remarkable unity, on climate change as well as other issues. This is likely to change as the memory of ten years in opposition fades gradually into the distance, but we really need to force the issue on climate change. There are quite a number of MP’s who are deeply concerned about climate change. When you meet them, they can quote the science better than most people here. But they won’t speak out against the policies of the Government that they are part of. And it simply isn’t good enough. We need to force the progressive voices within the ALP out into the public.

There are two cabinet ministers who are in Green marginal seats. Anthony Albanese (Infrastructure Minister) in inner city Sydney, and Lindsay Tanner (Finance Minister) in inner city Melbourne. When they realise they are about to lose their seat at the next election, they will begin screaming for more action on climate change within Cabinet. Anyone who lives in or near their electorates needs to start organising now to make this happen.

2009 needs to be a year of relentless organising and relentless protest. We simply do not have any choice.

Sometimes, when you look at the power and money of the big polluters, it’s pretty easy to feel overwhelmed and disempowered. They have virtually limitless funds, an army of lobbyists and access to whichever politicians they choose. But they are motivated fundamentally fear and greed. And we have something that they will never have. We have a vast network of people across this land that are driven by a deep love of life, and who will work tirelessly, for no pay, to defend what they love. And in the end, hope will always triumph over fear.

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The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Fredrick Douglass, letter to an abolitionist associate.

Climate changed

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:56:00 +0000

When Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson join forces with Al Gore and Chevrolet in the fight to save the earth, you’ve got to wonder what is going on. We are all environmentalists now, as celebrities and business leaders jostle to establish their green credentials. For those who’ve been campaigning to put climate change onto the public and political agenda for the past 30 years, the dramatic mainstreaming of the issue in the past 12 months has been a long awaited and hard fought success. But, with this success comes a number of challenges.

First and foremost is how to translate widespread concern into real political action. As yet, there hasn’t been much positive correlation between public and media interest in the issue, and actual policy change. Neither of Australia’s major political parties have policies to cut greenhouse pollution at anywhere near the rate required, and the chasm between rhetoric and policy reality continues to widen.

The climate change debate can be confusing at the best of times, and it has become even more so with the arrival of a plethora of new commentators. This raises another key question over the role of activists and NGO’s who, in some cases, are finding themselves increasingly squeezed out of a crowded media and ideas marketplace.

This article aims to explore these questions, as well as other tensions in the environmental movement as it once again goes through a resurgence – of sorts. It is a useful time to reflect on the lessons of the past 30 years and to look forward to the future.

The death of environmentalism?

In many ways, climate change is the mother of all environmental problems. It is likely to exacerbate many existing local and regional environmental impacts and threatens the health of the global ecosystem. For this reason, it is now the focus of much of the attention and effort of environmentalists the world over. And if the impacts are myriad and complex, so too are the causes. While burning coal and oil are the obvious culprits, their use is so widespread and ubiquitous in our economy that nothing short of an energy revolution is required to wean us off the addiction.

In 2004, a group of major environmental funders commissioned a strategic think-piece to analyze why the environment movement was ‘failing’ to win the climate change campaign. Written by two US based consultants Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism” provoked considerable debate within green NGO’s globally. One of the key observations of the paper was that climate change isn’t actually an environmental issue as such, and that the green movement’s continued ‘ownership’ of the issue was limiting the potential for other sectors to effectively engage. Climate change can be seen as a health issue, a social justice issue, an economic issue, a geopolitical strategic issue, and a basic issue of survival – none of which require an environmental worldview. The paper argued that for climate change to become mainstream, it would need to be actively engaged by these other interest groups to lift it out of the ‘green ghetto’. The implication being that the environmental movement had to either reframe the issue or get out of the road.

Since that time, the climate change debate has been well and truly reframed and has been actively engaged by everyone from the Pope to the Pentagon. The insurance industry were early business movers and have now been joined by a host of businesses that see financial opportunities in climate action, or financial risks from inaction. The economic case was most convincingly put by Sir Nicholas Stern in his 2006 report to the UK Government in which he argued that the economic cost of doing nothing would far exceed the cost of taking preventative measures to cut greenhouse pollution. The Pentagon issued a report in late 2005 that identified climate change as a major risk to US security interests and global geopolitical stability. Elements of the religious right in the US have begun calling for renewable energy, and development agencies are pushing for climate refugees to be considered under the UN refugee convention.

The issue that was for so long the domain of environmentalists is now mainstream, and has many new champions, including an unlikely white knight in the form of Al Gore. His film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ arrived at exactly the right time to act as a tipping point in public consciousness. But while most of the public now understands the seriousness of the issue, this concern is yet to translate into substantive action. Greenhouse emissions continue to soar. Australia is massively expanding its export coal industry and there are a plethora of proposed new coal fired power stations on the drawing boards. Both the Coalition and ALP went to the November 24 election with policies that would see a massive increase in greenhouse emissions over the next decade.

The era of false solutions – divide and conquer

While powerholders can no longer ignore the issue, they can certainly delay action through obfuscation and false solutions. And surprisingly, nearly all of the distractions and false solutions proposed by government or industry have been embraced by parts of the environmental movement.

The Nuclear industry has used the urgent threat of climate change as a platform to stage an attempted renaissance and they’ve received support from some surprising quarters. James Lovelock, renowned author of the Gaia hypothesis, has argued that nuclear waste, while not ideal, is a lesser risk to the planet than runaway global warming. It isn’t a practical argument given that even a massive adoption nuclear power would not have any significant impact on cutting greenhouse emissions within the required timeframe. Bizarrely, the argument seems to be based on a distortion of the same precautionary principle that has underpinned the environmental movement’s opposition to nuclear power and other risky technologies for the past fifty years. The issue of nuclear waste is as unresolved as ever, as is the question of where to put the reactors.

Howard started talking up nuclear power as a surefire way of creating division within the ALP but went silent on the issue in the run up to the election when it became clear that most Australians don’t want a reactor in their backyard. Nonetheless, he successfully created confusion and division over climate change solutions.

The other big technological red herring is so called ‘clean coal’. It’s a clever marketing device because it doesn’t really have a definition, doesn’t exist and is therefore difficult to critique in any real sense. If the various technologies proposed for carbon capture and storage (CCS) actually work, they will come online far too late to make the cuts that are required within the next decade. And it’s a very big if.

The thing that both nuclear power and so-called ‘clean coal’ have in common is that they are both technological solutions that employ the same 1950’s style, centralised, linear thinking that has got us into the problem in the first place. Dig it up, burn it, bury the waste and shift the problem to future generations. The flipside of this paradigm is the continued failure to understand and embrace renewable energy. How can an inherently decentralized technology that doesn’t directly involve mining or the creation of waste possibly work? Facts and the experiences from other countries are conveniently ignored to fit the story.

Voluntary action?

Another red herring, and one which much of the environment movement has embraced with enthusiasm, is the call for voluntary action. Take the case of incandescent light bulbs. On one hand, you can run expensive, time consuming education campaigns to encourage the uptake of more efficient light bulbs through voluntary, market based mechanisms. On the other hand, you can just ban inefficient bulbs. Much of the mainstream environmental movement did the former, while Malcolm Turnbull, a wealthy Liberal MP and a free-market ideologue, did the latter. Strange times indeed. It paints a disturbing picture of the politics and strategic approach of much of the mainstream environmental movement.

Encouraging people to take personal, voluntary action is great at one level, but it is no where near sufficient to bring about any where near the changes required within an ever closing time frame. And it brings the risk of de-politicising the issue by shifting focus onto individual consumers rather than powerholders. Of course, there is the argument that once people have their own backyard in order they’ll be a lot more willing to call for others to change. And voluntary, lifestyle action can often be an important stepping-stone along a journey of political development, but it’s a very roundabout way of trying to get change – particularly if you’re in a hurry and the stakes are this high. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntary seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler and far more effective to simply ban new coal fired power stations or put a tax on carbon than it is to convince 10 Million households to voluntarily buy green power.

The split between lifestyle activism and political activism has divided the environmental movement since the 1970’s, and has often been expressed as ongoing, low level sniping between the ‘back to the land’ permaculturalists vs city based activists. While the context is different, the debate is just as fruitless now as it ever was. It is admirable and important for people to ‘be the change you want to see in the world’, and we do need inspiring examples of how to live in harmony with the earth, but we’re also running out of time. It is clear that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legally binding emission reduction target, we need to start phasing out the coal industry, and we need targets and massive incentives for renewable energy. These are political solutions that require political action.

From rhetoric to revolution - how does change happen?

In his analysis of contemporary social movements, Bill Moyer identified a series of phases that movements go though which he articulated in his ‘Movement Action Plan’ (MAP). What Moyer found is that a situation of ‘business as usual’ is followed by what he described as ‘ripening conditions’, where the problem becomes increasingly obvious and official channels for resolving the problem fail. Some kind of ‘trigger event’ will then catapult the issue into the mainstream of public consciousness. However, while public understanding of the problem increases, public opposition to powerholder’s policies lags somewhat and this often results in a sense of ‘activist failure’, where it seems as though things should be changing a whole lot faster than they are. If you look back on the civil rights movement, anti-war movements and so on, this pattern can be seen clearly.

So according to this one map of how social movements progress, we’ve been here before. We’ve had some major trigger events and it’ll just take some time (and a lot of hard work) for people’s opposition to powerholder’s policies and for support for movement alternatives to catch up with the level of awareness and concern on the issue. The problem is that we don’t have time to wait.

The high stakes political game that is being played by those in power is to try to delay serious action on climate change for at least another five or so years – just long enough to enable the next generation of coal fired power stations and coal mines to be built in order to lock in the next 30 years of profits. From the other side, it is to ensure the transition to clean, renewable energy starts now so that we can make significant cuts in greenhouse pollution within the next 10 years – which is what the science tells us is required if we’re to avoid catastrophic, irreversible global warming.

Raising social costs

The issue clearly isn’t about winning the arguments and rational debate. It’s about power, and about overcoming the massive, vested interests of the fossil fuel and dependant industries. One of the clearest articulations of change making that I’ve seen is in Michael Albert’s book “The Trajectory of Change” in which he describes the ‘logic of dissent’. He writes: Short term we raise social costs until elites agree to implement our demands or end policies we oppose. Longer term we accumulate support and develop movement infrastructure and alternative institutions while working towards transforming society's defining relations.

In trying to figure out how to get change on any issue you need to ask a couple of simple questions. Who can give you what you want? What do they care about (what motivates them)? How do we get them to give us what we want? Or in Albert’s terms, how do we raise social costs?

As a general rule, the main thing that politicians care about is getting elected. The main thing that corporations care about is making money – it is essentially their reason for existence.

When Bob Hawke announced that he would stop the construction of the dam on the Franklin River, he made a calculation that it would help him win the election. Sure, there were moral arguments, and he probably liked the idea of doing the right thing, but ultimately it was a calculated political decision. He found a legal justification for the intervention and the rest is history. Anyone who has been involved in winning a campaign knows that this is how the business is done. It’s about power. Winning on climate change will be no different. Politicians will enact laws to radically cut greenhouse pollution when the political costs of them not doing so are higher than the costs of maintaining the status quo.

In 2003, over half a million people took to the streets in protest against the proposed invasion of Iraq. Howard surveyed the political landscape (no doubt with the aid of a lot of polling and focus groups) and he stared the movement down. In the equation of political cost vs benefit, the movement wasn’t powerful enough and, as a consequence, we went to war. Howard’s ability to ignore the biggest movement in recent history was partly dependant on the lack of any clear political opposition from the ALP, but also on other cultural factors. Howard knew that once we went to war, Australians would rally behind the diggers. Greenpeace got crucified in the media for protesting the departure of the HMAS Sydney because it was seen as an attack on the troops.

The challenge for the leadership of the peace movement was to figure out how to escalate the social and political costs associated with the war, whereas once the war started, the movement radically de-escalated. Similar challenges of escalation face the movement for climate action.

Polarising the issue

In the lead up to the 2007 election we had the vast majority of Australians in support of serious action on climate change and the issue was high on the political agenda. Both major political parties were responding to the issue, but doing it in a way that largely involved re-arranging deckchairs on the titanic of our fossil fuel dependent economy. A small handout here, a token gesture there.

One of the things that has changed significantly in recent years is the advent of poll driven politics in Australia. Where, politicians used to rely on their gut feel, now they increasingly rely on endless focus groups and polls to understand the nuances of the electorate. They know that people are concerned about climate change, but they also know that people are confused about what to do about it and it is difficult for punters to tell the difference between spin and substance. A 30% reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020? What does that really mean to the average person? What was that percentage again? And how on earth do you accurately measure greenhouse emissions anyhow? Even the environment movement is divided on the solutions and has many competing policy positions and demands which just become a swirling mess of gobbledygook when you start adding things like carbon trading into the mix.

If you look back at every successful environmental campaign of the past 30 years, the demands were clear, simple and compelling. It is impossible to win public campaigns if the issues are grey and confused. There needs to be a problem and a solution, a good guy and a bad guy.

One of the limitations of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, is that it fails to identify a target or even a coherent demand. It leaves the public feeling that we have a climate crisis that, inexplicably, is all of our fault, and that we all need to work together to solve it. So while the film was spectacularly successful at raising awareness and profile, it’s framing of the issue was profoundly unhelpful from a campaigning point of view.

How about this instead… We have a crisis that is caused by burning fossil fuels. We need to stop burning fossil fuels. This means no new coal or oil projects and rapid shift to renewable energy. The fossil fuel industry are the bad guys. The renewable energy industry are the good guys. We need to make burning more fossil fuels socially, politically and economically impossible.This means raising the costs (social, political and economic) for the fossil fuel industry and any politicians or financiers who support them - until we keep fossil carbon in the ground. End of story.

Instead we have endless policy analysis about carbon trading and incomprehensible market mechanisms. We have demands for something percent cuts in some immeasurable quantity of something that people really don’t understand by some far-flung future date that is really beyond our comprehension.

A sheep in wolf’s clothing?

So why isn’t the environmental movement cutting through with hard edged, clear campaigns that demand what is required? Three weeks out from the Federal Election, the industry group Environmental Business Australia (with members including Woolworths, BP and the Commonwealth Bank) released a climate change pledge calling on political parties to support a range of policy measures that were almost identical to the policy demands of the peak environment groups (ACF, Conservation Councils, Greenpeace etc).

This is no doubt partly due to the lowest common denominator consensus process that has plagued the environment movement for at least the last decade, but there are also other factors at play. After ten years of the Howard Government, many activist organizations are feeling beaten up around the edges. It feels as though our vision has been reduced. We’ve become more ‘realistic’ - too scared of being accused of extremism. The terms of allowable debate have been narrowed and we’ve found ourselves somehow complying – talking about things we never wanted to talk about, in ways that we never imagined. There is a fine line between ‘appealing to the mainstream’ and becoming so bland as to become irrelevant.

The environmental movement has always been a middle class movement in Australia, and has long suffered from being too nice, (nice, of course, is an acronym for Not Insightful or Critical Enough) but the climate change movement has taken things to an extreme. Invariably, NGO climate strategy meetings end up spending more time getting bogged down in some minutia about how a hypothetical carbon trading market might work than actually discussing campaigns that will have impact. And it is the assumptions of these discussions that are most disturbing – as though the global justice movement had never existed and market mechanisms are all we have left.

The carbon trading debate has so far been dominated by economists and policy wonks and has seen little public discussion of the big political issues surrounding what is essentially the privatisation of the atmosphere and the world’s carbon banks. In the European emissions trading scheme, the well accepted principle of ‘polluter pays’ was turned on it’s head, with the big polluters receiving billions in public handouts without actually having to cut emissions. We shouldn’t feel obliged to be nice about this. We should be angry. Not only is our planet being destroyed, but we’re paying the corporations who are doing it.

Re-imagining the movement

Over recent months there has been a subtle shift. The mild consensus is cracking. Questions are being asked. Some of the exciting vision, ideas and hope of the global justice movement have begun to appear, providing a tantalizing glimpse of what lies ahead. Recent direct actions by students against the coal industry in Victoria and NSW are an encouraging sign that the status quo is becoming unacceptable. Projects like ‘Cheat Neutral’ are emerging to ridicule false solutions and the words ‘climate change’ and ‘capitalism’ were even used in the same sentence at a recent Sydney rally.

I’m confident that social movements will rise to the challenge of climate change in the years to come, but it won’t be the movement of professional NGO’s that have dominated climate politics to date. Sure, they’ll still be part of the landscape and will have an important role to play, but the real people’s movement that will rise up to transform our society is still only barely discernable. It’s still just a sparkle in that student’s eye. It’s politics are still being scratched out on the back of beer mats in pubs all over the country. It’s tactics are being re-imagined – the bastard children of the Franklin, North East Forests, James Hardy and Jabiluka campaigns. The movement has reinvented itself before, and it will do so again, as the tide of public opinion turns once more.

Howard spins into hotter water

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 12:43:00 +0000

After ten years of being a climate sceptic, John Howard begrudgingly pronounced himself a climate change realist. But while the rhetoric has changed, Government policy hasn’t. Australia’s greenhouse pollution continues to soar as the renewables industry slowly but surely packs its bags and heads overseas. Meanwhile the coal industry continues to expand with the help of massive public subsidies.

With APEC over and the federal election looming, Howard is behind in the polls. With climate change still a hot button issue, he has a simple choice: He can either do something serious to tackle climate change and win voter confidence, or he can somehow try to take climate change off the political agenda. His trick will be to figure out how to appear to be doing the former, while actually doing the latter - and this is exactly what the Government’s $23 million climate change advertising campaign attempts to do.

Inviting individuals to ‘Be Climate Clever’, the ad urges Australians to take responsibility where the Government is not. The campaign is craftily designed to deflect attention away from the need for policy change. By embracing an increasingly concerned community, Howard is gambling that he can convince voters that they don’t need to worry about climate change; as long as they do their bit at home the Government will take care of the rest.

Without irony, the ad insists that “Together we can be Climate Clever.” It’s as if we each have equal responsibility: You, me, Mum, Cam and Pru next door, and the Howard Government - working shoulder to shoulder to solve the climate crisis. In a sense it is true. We all do need to be part of the solution. Most of us can reduce greenhouse emissions in our own homes. But in another sense, it is a sophisticated manipulation.

Howard knows that in order to really cut greenhouse pollution we need to make the big polluters pay for their environmental impact. We need a legislated emissions reduction target and we need targets and incentives for renewable energy. These are policy solutions that require political leadership. Deflecting the need for climate action back to individual households is a great ploy to delay the necessary action by at least another few years.

Don’t get me wrong, personal, voluntary action is great - but it is not sufficient. When we wanted to stop asbestos being used we just banned it – we didn’t ask people to voluntarily seek alternatives while continuing to subsidise asbestos producers. It’s far simpler to ban new coal fired power stations than it is to convince 20 million people to voluntarily buy green power. It’s easier and cheaper to simply legislate for high energy efficiency standards than it is to voluntarily change 50 million lightbulbs – one at a time. In the final analysis, it doesn’t matter how many energy efficient lightbulbs you install if the Government continues to approve new coal fired power stations and coal mines. It doesn’t matter how good you are at turning off your computer if our Government continues to undermine global action on climate change and the Kyoto protocol.

While the Howard Government tries to distract us all with appeals for ‘aspirational’ targets, voluntary action, and the myth that coal can be clean, the reality is that we’re going to need more than words if we’re to avoid climate chaos.

The only really honest statement in the ad campaign is that “Climate change affects us all”. We are all in it together, and we can all be part of the solution, but the key role for individuals is to hold our Government accountable and force them to take real action. We need a legally binding target to reduce emissions by at least 30% by 2020. We need to stop building coal fired power stations and coal mines, and we need a massive investment in renewable energy. Anything else is not climate clever, it’s just more hot air.

Cheat Neutral

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 22:29:00 +0000

Having problems being faithful? Why not offset your infidelity by paying someone else to do the right thing? This very funny and biting project exposes the absurdity of carbon offsets.

Seeing through the APEC police state

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:41:00 +0000

It would seem that the battle lines are drawn. On one side are thousands of highly trained police with batons, tazers and a brand spanking new water canon. On the other side are the people of Sydney. Hang on a minute. Isn’t there something wrong here? In an era of anti-terrorist hype, it is all too easy for beefcake politics to trample over democracy and for the issues to be obscured by hyperbole and shows of police strength.

Quite simply, John Howard is trying to use the APEC summit to further undermine global action on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol. So of course people are going to protest. And so we should.

When the laws are unjust or are destroying our future, and when official channels continue to fail, people of conscience have a responsibility to act. We have a responsibility to take to the streets to hold our elected decision makers accountable. Whether it be your State MP that is supporting a new coal fired power station, your Federal MP who is refusing to support renewable energy, or our PM who is trying to wreck the international framework for greenhouse gas reductions.

Peaceful direct action and civil disobedience are a fundamental part of our democracy. The reason we have weekends is because of labour movement protests. Women have the vote because the Suffragettes took to the streets. The anti-slavery movement, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement all used civil disobedience to win fundamental freedoms that we now take for granted.

When your children ask you about climate change and about the future, can you honestly look them in the eye and tell them that it’ll be ok? And that you’re doing enough to protect their future?

Climate change is already resulting in more extreme weather events, displacing people from their homes, and is expected to cause massive problems of starvation, not to mention extinction. It’s time to move beyond the endless rhetoric and posturing of our political leaders. We need to massively cut greenhouse pollution and we need to start doing it now. Howard’s APEC agenda is basically to take us in the opposite direction by undermining the Kyoto process and pushing for non-binding, aspirational targets. In other words - more hot air and no action.

So amid the inevitable discussions about violence on the street, it’s important to remember the overwhelming moral imperative that is driving people to protest. And the serious violence that needs to be exposed is the violence on the people and the planet that will be unleashed if Howard succeeds in his attempt to use APEC to undermine Kyoto and climate change reaches tipping point.

APEC - Australia Pushing Export Coal

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 14:43:00 +0000

The leaders of the 21 nations of APEC will decend upon Sydney in a matter of weeks. It would appear that Sydneysiders are greeting the meeting with an appropriate level of indifference. Our lives will be disrupted by the security, and our common sense will be assuaulted by the hyperbole that will no doubt eminate from our good Prime Minister.

The Agenda is supposed to be about driving action on climate change but, it's really about positioning in the lead up to the federal election. Greenpeace was leaked a copy of the draft declaration on climate change that is due to come out of the meeting.

The document is long on rhetoric, and short on substance. Typical for Howard, it stresses voluntary targets for greenhouse gas reduction, that can then be changed later on if they get too hard. What kind of a target is that?

It is clear that the real agenda behind Howard's posturing at APEC is to undermine the Kyoto protocol in the lead up to the second commitment period. Sure, Kyoto is highly problematic becuase it doesn't go far enough - which is why it needs to be seriously improved and tightened up - not further undermined.

Australia managed to win significant concessions in the negotiation of the first commitment period under Kyoto - which made it seem odd that we then didn't ratify it. The only obvious explanation for our continual undermining of Kyoto is that it if it is effective in driving down greenhouse pollution in other countries, it will have a big negative impact on the Australian export coal industry. In this context, APEC might well be renamed from 'Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation' to 'Australia Pushing Export Coal'.

Is nanotechnology the new creationism?

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:04:00 +0000

Have you ever watched a child carefully taking apart their favourite toy, only to find that they can’t for the life of them put it back together again? It’s a phenomenon that’s as old as humpty dumpty and as old as the enlightenment.

We’re remarkably good at pulling things apart. Scientists have been doing it for hundreds of years - looking at smaller and smaller pieces of our world. Every time we thought we’d found the smallest bit, it in turn was revealed to be made of ever more minute components like so many Russian dolls. But while we may have been able to take the universe apart, until now we haven’t had the first clue how to put it back together again. With the new alchemy of nanotechnology, we’re set to reverse this trend - to create what hitherto has only been able to be reduced.

Working at the nano scale, the boundaries between scientific disciplines are increasingly blurred – a phenomenon known as ‘convergence’. When we add the Bits of information technology with the Atoms of molecular manufacturing, tie them up with Neurons and cutting edge cognitive sciences, and then add Genes to throw a bit of life into the party, the whole thing’s likely to go off with a BANG! The typically lyrical, Canadian based ETC Group has labelled the convergence of these powerful technologies The Little BANG Theory.

The hyper-optimism with which nano and biotechnologies are being promoted has an almost religious zeal. Perhaps we're witnessing the birth of a new creationism?

The Kimberley

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Tue, 22 May 2007 14:07:00 +0000

When you are in the Kimberley in north west Australia, you know you are on aboriginal land. The ancient landscape puts in you in your place. It's a humbling experience.

After nearly 3 weeks of sleeping under the night sky, the tensions and stresses of our strange urban existance all seem to dissolve into nothingness. What was the point of that meeting again? And what about that new electronic gadget I was thinking of getting? Oh look, a billion stars stretching into eternity. And under my feet, a landscape that has sustained a rich civilisation for over 40, 000 years.

The experience is one of humility yet also one of potency. In less than a hundred years, a heady mix of colonisation, technology and ideology all but obliterated one of the oldest living civilisations on earth. And a bauxite mine, if approved on the Mitchell Plateau could reduce a unique and diverse ecosystem to little more than monoculture in the blink of an eye. And yet the landscape engulfs you. The birds laugh at you and the Goanna's ignore you, as your own self importance slowly blows away to swirl and settle in the red soil. More photos

Like You

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 06:54:00 +0000

I stumbled accross this poem - "like you" by El Salvadorean poet Roque Dalton. It was used as a reference in a great article about movement strategy published last year by 'The Free Association'

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.
And that my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Bio to Nano: Technology, Risk & Democracy

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 09:12:00 +0000

Chain Reaction, Autumn 2006

The scientific and business community are still struggling to understand the global public rejection of genetically engineered (GE) foods, and with the growing discourse around the risks and disruptive impacts of nanotechnology, many are becoming increasingly worried that history is about to repeat itself. There is a blossoming of reports and conferences that explore ‘From bio to nano’ and how governments can avoid ‘fighting the last war’. PR consultancies and think-tanks are doing a roaring trade in communications advice and ‘upstream engagement’ tools to minimize the risk of backlash. However, it is becoming clear that virtually all of the issues that have made GE food so controversial are also present with nanotechnology. The only real question that remains for executives and politicians worried about a nano backlash is… when?

In some ways, the outrage over GE was the accumulated and unexpressed outrage over the role of industrial agriculture and chemical companies in our lives for the past fifty years. It was a gut-level reaction that the industrial experiment had gone far enough. When pesticides were first introduced, it was done with little or no knowledge by the general public of the negative effects, and it was done when the modern environmental and consumer movements had yet to develop. However, 40 years after Rachael Carson wrote ‘Silent Spring’, after 4 decades of creeping revelations about the health and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, after 4 decades of increasing public skepticism about the impacts of science, the public was not willing to idly accept the next major technological experiment with the environment and with their health.

Social movements don’t spring out of nowhere. They emerge and grow within a context – a mixture of culture, counter-culture, hopes, fears and ideas. The dramatic rejection of GE foods in the mid-late 1990’s was a trigger event in a movement that started long before. The groundwork was laid by the many groups who had been campaigning against GE since the mid 1980’s, so by the time Monsanto started planting commercial GE crops in the US in 1996, there was a clear political, social, intellectual and cultural context for the movement to flourish. The public was recently attuned to the problems of industrial food systems following BSE and other food/health scares, and was already distrustful of chemical companies. The obvious and immediate question over GE foods was, and still is, who benefits and who bears the risks? The answer was obvious. So was the response.

The official debate about GE has largely been limited to a narrow discussion of risk – involving an assessment of both the probability of some negative event happening, and the magnitude of the consequences. However, theorists such as Ulrich Beck have argued that the potential consequences of new technologies such as nuclear fusion and biotechnology render this traditional risk assessment approach inadequate because of the new and potentially massive scale of the consequences and the fact that, in the long run, the least likely event will occur. But even this critique misses what has been one of the primary sticking points for public acceptance of GE foods - the simple fact that the people who create the risks are not necessarily the ones who accept the consequences. Why should a person or a community accept any level of risk whatsoever if there is no benefit for them? On the otherhand, it is easy to see why companies are less concerned about creating and imposing risks if they are not accountable for consequences.

The mainstream debate on risk has flourished because it essentially leaves the paradigm of technological development intact. The basic assumption is that new technologies will be introduced unless a relatively narrow scientific assessment indicates that there will be negative impacts. This is in stark contrast to the model proposed by many critics of GE who argue that the burden of proof should be reversed – and that proponents of risky new technologies should be required to prove safety prior to introduction of their products. There is a rather compelling argument that both the probability of negative effects of genetic engineering, and the scale of any negative consequences are fundamentally unpredictable. Thereby justifying a precautionary and enduring ban on the release of GE organisms into the environment.

Despite the early stage of technology adoption, the debate about nano risks is already quite well developed. This is probably due to a combination of a number of factors, including a more active regulatory and public/media context around risk following 10 years of relentless public conflict over GE. The other factors are the similarities between nanoparticle toxicity and the known toxicity of other ultra-fine particles (vehicular emissions etc) and the doyen of public health scandals – asbestos. However, issues of direct environmental and health risks are only one small part of a bigger picture. The introduction of transformative new technologies also raises more fundamental questions about values and ideas about our future.

The problem is that it has somehow become taboo to contest ideas. It’s as if industrial capitalism is somehow not an idea and is therefore exempt from scrutiny, while anything else can be dismissed as ‘ideology’ – a slur that implies a lack of critical perspective. At this point, it is worth asking what kind of society is it where anyone who raises criticisms of new technology is immediately derided as an ideologue and a luddite? It’s almost as though science has achieved a quasi-religious status, where bio and nanotech might well be regarded as the new creationism.

So what are the values that underpin the coming nanotechnology revolution? To answer this question, we need to ask a few closely related questions. Who is funding the technology? In whose interests is it being developed? To what end? How are decisions being made about the technology and by whom? The short answer is that nanotechnology is primarily being developed by the world’s largest corporations and by the US military in order to introduce a range of new products and processes either for the purposes of increasing profits or extending military supremacy. While there are some genuinely interesting and possibly beneficial applications of nanoscience, this is not where the real action is and certainly isn’t what is driving research agendas.

At a fundamental level, the debate over nanotechnology will be about democracy. It will be about our future and who gets to define it. About who benefits and who bears the negative impacts. That’s what the GE campaign is about, and that’s what is at stake with nano. In the absence of a cautious and responsible approach by governments and industry to such a powerful set of technologies, the community is faced with little choice but to put the brakes on - using whatever means are possible.

John Hepburn

For more information about nanotechnology, risk and democracy, visit http://nano.foe.org.au

After the Thaw

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sun, 14 May 2006 22:10:00 +0000

Great events in human history are captured in our memories like fish in ice at the sudden onset of winter. Frozen in time, to be thawed and trawled out in generations to come by curious grandchildren. What were you doing when it happened? Where were you? Who were you with? How did you feel?

Most of these defining moments are shared. The event happens. News flashes around the globe. For a moment we are transfixed, shocked, in awe. JFK has been assassinated…the Berlin Wall came down… the planes hit the twin towers… bonds are created as we share in the tragedy or the elation of the moment.

I recently experienced the defining moment of my generation - the event to dwarf all others. But strangely, I had it all to myself, staring at an email on my computer screen as I struggled to comprehend… humans are changing the climate.

My great grandchildren are unlikely to care about September 11, or about John Howard, or who won the world cup in 2006. They’re going to want to know how, in the space of only 4 generations, we created a mass wave of extinctions by triggering a climatic shift so dramatic that evolution was left flailing in it’s wake. And they’re going to want to know why my generation didn’t do anything when we knew it was happening.

Late last year, scientists revealed that the Siberian permafrost is melting. Researchers found that an area of permafrost spanning a million square kilometres - the size of France and Germany combined - has started to melt for the first time since it formed 11,000 years ago.

The area in question, covering the entire sub-Arctic region of western Siberia, is the world's largest frozen peat bog and scientists fear that, as it thaws, it will release billions of tonnes of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

It is yet another example of a scenario climate scientists have feared since first identifying "tipping points" - delicate thresholds where a slight rise in the Earth's temperature can cause a dramatic change in the environment that itself triggers a far greater increase in global temperatures. The news managed to climb to the dizzy heights of story number 6 on the radio news. The lead story has already slipped from memory.

Much like the thaw of the permafrost or the dawn sweeping across the landscape, the realization that climate change is real and catastrophic spreads slowly. While I’ve had an intellectual understanding of climate change for many years and have followed the scientific developments with increasing concern, at some deeper level it just hadn’t sunk in. Now it has. And it’s not the loss of skiing holidays that is most concerning – it’s the loss of life.

A 2004 study published in Nature magazine examined the extinction risk from climate change in six biodiversity-rich regions, representing one fifth of the Earth's land area. The researchers concluded that from 15 to 37% of all the species in the regions studied could be driven to extinction by the climate changes likely between now and 2050. Climate change and the impacts of industrialization and over-consumption are driving a mass wave of extinction that is leading many scientists, like world famous paleoanthropologist, Dr. Richard Leakey, to predict that up to 50% of all species will be extinct within the next 100 years.

To put this in context, the fossil record reveals five great extinction episodes in the last half-billion years. The last happened 65 million years ago when dinosaurs became extinct. It has been calculated that the current rate of extinction is one thousand to ten thousand times the background rate – and rising. To draw the blunt but obvious conclusion - humans are now causing the sixth mass wave of extinctions in the 4 billion year history of life on earth.

Nature has always had to adapt to changing climate conditions. Indeed, it is one of the driving forces behind the process of evolution that has produced the staggering variety of life on Earth. But the very real fear is that the changes currently under way are simply too rapid for species to evolve new strategies for survival.

People can pack up their gear into cars and move (at least, wealthy people can). We can build dwellings. We can grow food in greenhouses. Other creatures can’t. Humans are incredibly adaptive to change – it is one of our greatest qualities, and, so it would appear, one of our greatest liabilities as we go about resigning ourselves to accept climate change.

A lot of us seem to have forgotten that our life depends on functioning ecosystems. Food, medicines, clean air and water are the obvious things. Maybe we really can keep living with dramatically reduced diversity of life on earth? But given that we only have the slightest clue about what life actually exists, let alone what functions it performs in keeping our global environment in equilibrium, it’s a pretty big gamble. It’s a bit like letting a neurologist remove 90% of your brain because they only know what 10% of it does. If there is one thing that we have learnt about ecology over the past 50 years it is that natural systems are complex and symbiotic. Changing one thing invariable results in flow on effects.

In the face of the enormous challenge posed by climate change, our elected political leaders are flailing aimlessly. The oil and coal industries have such a stranglehold over our economy and our public institutions that they stymie any attempts at change. Political parties on the right and left are beholden to big energy and are paralysed by a chronic failure of the imagination.

At this point, we don’t just need a 10% renewable energy target. We don’t need people just to buy energy efficient light bulbs. We certainly can’t pin our hopes on just cleaning up coal. We need a radical and urgent transition plan to a green economy. We need a green development programme that will make the Marshall Plan look like a Sunday school picnic. The transition away from destructive industries and their replacement with efficient, sustainable alternatives needs to be the basis of the next industrial revolution.

It’s not even worth saying that it won’t be easy. It will take the combined energies of our best planners, economists, artists, engineers, teachers, managers, scientists and farmers to make it happen. We already have a host of brilliant and practical ideas from some of the brightest and most creative thinkers of our time. What we lack is the collective courage and leadership to make the investments and to take risks - investments and risks that are commensurate with the size of the challenge. The consequences of the doing nothing are just far too devastating and irresponsible to contemplate.

My father spent his whole working life in the coal industry. The challenge of his generation of engineers was to grow and to manage the industrial revolution. They didn’t know about climate change back then. My first three years as a graduate engineer in the early 90’s were spent designing and building equipment for the coal, oil and gas industries. I didn’t really know about climate change then either. Now I do. And the thing about being human is that we have the capacity to learn from history. And between stimulus and response we have choice.

It seems clear enough. Either we rise to meet the challenge of our age - or we don’t. If we do, it will require a political movement to transform our economy – with a role for every single one of us. If we don’t, then our current political and business leaders will be inscribed in the record books as the drivers of, and collaborators in, the most senseless and destructive chapter in human history. And the rest of us will be secure in the anonymity of spectatorship – at least until those grandchildren start asking pesky questions.

Size matters - public opinion doesn't

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Mon, 08 May 2006 06:48:00 +0000

Canberra Times, 8th May 2006
The release last month of a Federal Government discussion paper on the development of a national nanotechnology strategy created ‘nano ripples’ throughout the community – so small as to be imperceptible to the human eye. Nanotechnology is being heralded as the next industrial revolution, redefining life as we know it, but with only one month for public comment, the development of a national strategy to manage the most powerful and transformative technology in human history will involve less public participation than a development application to retrofit your local pub. Given the stakes, it is high time that we sat up and started paying attention to the way this technology is set to reshape our world – and in whose interests.

The release of the discussion paper coincided with the first ever recall of a nanotechnology product. In Germany, there were 39 cases of serious respiratory problems and six people were hospitalized in late March after using the nanotech bathroom cleaner "Magic Nano". While it is not yet clear if nanotechnology is to blame for these health problems, the important point is that no government anywhere regulates nano-scale materials if the same chemical substance has been vetted at the macro-scale. Yet it is precisely because nano materials behave differently to their macro-scale counterparts that they are attracting so much investment and research interest.

Nanoparticles are generally understood to be particles below 100 nano metres in size (about one eighty thousandth of the width of a human hair) that take advantage of property changes that occur at the nano-scale. Nano-scale materials may be more reactive, have different optical, magnetic and electric properties, and be much stronger or more toxic than their larger scale counterparts. For example, aluminum oxide - used in dentistry because of its inertness - can spontaneously explode at the nano- scale and is currently being tested as a potential rocket fuel.

There are a wide range of concerns with nanotechnology, not least of which is the issue of nanotoxicity. The defense systems of the human body are generally not designed to deal with such small particles. In general, nanoparticles of 70 nanometres can enter the lungs, a 50 nm particle can enter cells and a 30 nm particle can pass through the blood / brain barrier.

In response to concerns over health and environmental safety, the Royal Society in the United Kingdom released a report in 2004 with a series of wide ranging recommendations. They recommend that “Until more is known about the environmental impacts of nanoparticles and nanotubes, their release into the environment should be avoided as far as possible”; and that “Ingredients in the form of nanoparticles undergo a full safety assessment before they are permitted for use in products”.

The problem is that the regulators are not listening. As the scientific evidence of nano hazards continues to mount, so does the number of products containing nanoparticles that are already on the shelves – from sunscreens to cosmetics, car parts and even food.

Beyond the immediate health and environmental risks, the more complex and far-reaching implications of nanotechnology are a little further up the development pipeline. Molecular manufacturing techniques for putting together products atom-by-atom and the merging of non-living nano-materials and living organisms have the power to literally re-make our world from the atom up, and to fundamentally change our relationship with the natural world.

However, readers of the discussion paper issued by the Australian Government’s National Nanotechnology Taskforce would be none the wiser about such issues. The aim of the paper seems to be to reassure the reader that nanotechnology isn’t really new and certainly isn’t anything to worry about. The speculative benefits of nanotechnology are pronounced with certainty from on high, while questions of risk, and even known hazards are heavily qualified and the waters muddied.

It is clear that there is an urgent and growing regulatory gap, where nano product development is being fast-tracked at the expense of environmental health and safety. If recommendations from the Royal Society, one of the world’s most conservative and well-respected scientific bodies haven’t triggered a regulatory response, it is unclear what will. Perhaps the nanotechnology industry is waiting for the same kind of consumer and environmental backlash that emerged over genetically engineered foods?

The transformative power of the new nanotechnologies signals that it is time for us to take the democratisation of science seriously. Over the past 200 years, scientists have altered our world as much, if not more than elected officials, yet they are accountable to nobody save the corporations that increasingly fund them. We need a new way of thinking about science and technology that allows the development of technology to be shaped by the needs of the community and the environment — not the other way around. Just as scientists are exploring uncharted territory through the emerging nanotechnologies, so must we also explore uncharted territory in terms of how these technologies are managed — and crucially, in whose interests. The development of a nanotechnology strategy for Australia deserves far more public involvement and scrutiny than it is currently being given.

For more information about Nanotechnology, visit www.nano.foe.org.au

Creating an ecological, workers co-op - a case study of 'Reverse Garbage'

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:44:00 +0000

In case anyone hadn’t noticed, our economy is killing the planet. It also commits millions of people to live in poverty and is creating an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Some of us think that we should do something about it.

The failures are systemic and the solutions also need to be systemic. We need fundamental changes in the way that we think about our relationship with each other and with the earth, and changes in the fundamental power relations in society. Not only do we need to challenge the existing power structures (stop inappropriate development, pollution etc), but we also need to build alternatives – alternative economic systems, alternative political systems, and alternative cultural and social norms.

We already have plenty of technological fixes. The thing that we need to get a whole lot better at is the political and economic fixes. We need to learn how to work co-operatively, we need to learn how to do real democracy at a local community level, we need to learn how to create an ecological economy – now! We can’t wait for experts to teach us what to do. We need to learn by doing. The change that is required for sustainability is going to be led by local communities. It is going to be messy, we’re going to experiment, get things wrong, get things right and move on.

This essay is a history of one attempt at starting an ecologically based, worker managed co-operative in Brisbane, Australia. It is one of many experiments happening all over the world aimed at creating viable models for ecologically sustainable economic and community development. This is written 6 years after we started Reverse Garbage so we have the benefit of at least a little hindsight – to learn what worked and what didn’t – what to replicate and what to avoid.

There tends to be a lot of woolly thinking about ‘alternative models’ – which are often promoted well beyond their capacity to deliver worthwhile results. Part of this problem is excessive self promotion driven by the need to obtain funding. However, another part is the pervasive sense of hopefulness whereby people switch off their critical faculties when they encounter nice people trying to do good things. It is useful to remember that Nice is most usefully thought of as an acronym for “Not Insightful or Critical Enough” and, if we are going to succeed in replacing the current model of doomsday economics with something more life affirming and sustainable, we are going to have to subject alternatives to critical scrutiny.

In that vein, this essay provides a brief (and personal) history of the creation of Reverse Garbage Co-op in Brisbane. It is partly a history of people, places and goings on, and partly an analysis of ideas and their practical application.
If Reverse Garbage is the answer, what was the question?

Working with Friends of the Earth Brisbane at the end of 1997, a few of us were asking the following questions:

q How can we earn a living doing something that makes a positive contribution to the environment and to our community?
q How can Friends of the Earth develop a secure source of ongoing funding that fits with their vision and the values and that doesn’t compromise the integrity of the organisation?
q How can we start creating an alternative, sustainable and equitable local economy as a way to help encourage and inspire broader change?

The idea

We were inspired by the Wombles. It seemed that there had to be opportunities to live off the discards of our wasteful, industrial society. Whenever you walk past an industrial skip you see valuable materials destined to be buried in the ground. Our economy systematically destroys ecosystems in order to create ‘products’, which we then fail to use efficiently and turn into another environmental problem through landfill. Because this is common practice, it is easy to think of it as normal – which it isn’t. It is actually insane and grossly inefficient, not to mention morally reprehensible in light of the flow-on ecological and social consequences.

After travelling around the east coast of Australia looking for interesting models of recycling businesses that work, there were two obvious options:
- re-use of industrial discards (Reverse Garbage in Sydney and Melbourne)
- tip shops (Hobart, Canberra)

Initial evaluation

It became evident that a tip shop, while possible, was going to take quite a long time to establish in Brisbane due to the constraints of the waste management infrastructure that was in place. Brisbane has a system of ‘transfer stations’ where ‘wasted resources’ are delivered and dropped into a pit, crushed by a bulldozer and loaded into trucks to be transferred to landfill sites outside of town. This is far from ideal in terms of salvaging useful items for re-use or recycling.

After visiting the Reverse Garbage operations in Sydney and Melbourne, it seemed that there was a similar opportunity for creative re-use of industrial discards in Brisbane.

Reverse Garbage in Sydney had been started by teachers as a way of providing low cost art materials to schools. While it had developed a strong environmental ethic, the initial impetus for the organisation seemed to be more artistic/educational than directly environmental. The business had been running for over 20 years and had managed to achieve a reasonable level of financial viability despite being subsidized by local government through the provision of low cost rent for their warehouse and grounds.

A quick analysis of the industrial base of Brisbane compared to Sydney and Melbourne revealed that Brisbane had a smaller number of large manufacturing organisations but that there was still a sufficiently large waste stream for us to proceed with some basic market research.

Creating an initial project team

I spoke with a number of other people who I thought may be interested in being part of setting up a Reverse Garbage operation in Brisbane. Lots of people liked the idea but none who seemed serious about committing to the project. I asked an old friend from University who had recently quit working as an engineer and was looking at ways of earning a living in an ethical way. Mitch Semple and I agreed to start working together on the project.

Shortly after that, and only a few weeks after visiting Reverse Garbage in Sydney, I was contacted by Lena Tisdall, a Brisbane artist who was keen to start some kind of Reverse Garbage creative re-use center after being inspired by RG Sydney.

I had an initial meeting with Lena and outlined the plans to date. She had lots of great ideas, a useful range of skills and networks and was super keen. Lena, Mitch and I started to build a 3 way working relationship – to clearly articulate our vision and to agree on some principles and processes by which to work together.

We agreed to conduct some basic market research and then evaluate the viability of the project based on the results of the research.

Initial funding sources

We opened a bank account and Mitch, Lena and I each put in $50 to cover the initial cost of postage and phone calls. Mitch and I started investigating the “New Enterprise Incentive Scheme’ (NEIS) which was designed to provide 12 months income support for unemployed people starting their own business. We both managed to enroll in some kind of vague pre-NEIS scheme which at least meant that we could stay on the dole without having to look for work.
Market Research

The viability of Reverse Garbage was going to depend on two factors:
1. a consistent and accessible supply of a wide variety of high quality (valuable) discards;
2. customers who would be willing to buy the materials.

From the visits to Reverse Garbage in Sydney and Melbourne, we had a basic list of the industries from which they sourced their materials. This coupled with Mitch’s and my background as manufacturing engineers and our knowledge of the local manufacturing sector gave us a long list of potential ‘suppliers’.

Lena had worked in schools as an artist and provided the outline of a potential customer base - including schools, kindergartens, the Rock Eistedford, artists and a number of other potential customer groups.

We designed a survey to collect key information from potential customers about their interest in a Reverse Garbage resource center and potential spending. We mailed these surveys to several hundred schools and managed to get a sufficient number of surveys back to see that there was some real interest. We did some basic figures on the size of the market (number of schools multiplied by their average art materials budget multiplied by an estimated % market share) and figured out that it looked reasonably viable.

On the supply side, we phoned over a hundred companies and asked them if they had anything potentially useful that they throw out as part of their usual operations. From this we built a list of potential products and potential suppliers.

Growing the team – stage 1

We reaslised that, due to the relatively low value of the products we were going to be selling, if Reverse Garbage was going to be financially viable, it was going to have to be a high turnover business. This meant that it was going to have to be a reasonably large operation – certainly employing more than 3 people. So we started to think about growing the team.

Peter Maclean (who I had been working with on various different green business proposals) started to become more involved with Reverse Garbage as Mitch and I began writing the business plan.

Around this time I met John Gower, a professional fundraiser with a long history in retail. I spoke with him about fundraising for FoE Brisbane and the vision of Reverse Garbage - and to ask for advice. He somehow became inspired by the RG vision and offered to help with the development of the project.

Dealing with the NEIS scheme

Under normal circumstances, the NEIS scheme involves full time business training for several months, followed by 12 months of ‘hassle free’ dole money, as well as some mentoring from a business advisor. From the outset, our attitude towards NEIS was that we didn’t want training but just wanted access to a hassle free living wage for 12 months so we could get on with setting up the business.

Our initial operations plan told us that we were going to need a total of 8 people to run the organisation on the scale that we thought was required to be profitable. NEIS had only ever dealt with small business start ups with a maximum of 3 people – so 8 was just plain weird. They had also never dealt with a non-profit business before – this was weirder still. And they were insisting that we had to do 3 months business training.

We eventually wore them down. Mitch and I both had business degrees, and John Gower had run multi million dollar businesses for years – so we convinced them that we knew what we were doing. NEIS agreed that for every person who had business experience, we could have one other person on the NEIS programme who didn’t need to do the training. So we managed to get spaces for 6 people on NEIS and managed to avoid having to sit through months of training.

Growing the team – stage 2

We were meeting weekly in the room above the West End library on Boundary Street. Our office consisted of a couple of cramped desks with phones in the FoE office out the back of Justice Products, also on Boundary Street.

We placed a two line ad in the Courier Mail for 3 people to work in a non-profit recycling co-op and we also put up ads in some of the local greenie hang outs. An initial phone call screened out most people when they realized that they would have to work full time and only get paid the equivalent of the dole – and they would have to become a director of a co-operative. We interviewed 5 or 6 people and ended up inviting three women to become part of the project, including Lisa Owen who at the time of writing is the longest standing member of Reverse Garbage (6 years and still going strong).

After a few weeks, one of the new recruits was coming to meetings late and it became obvious that some of the tasks weren’t being done. We didn’t have the time or energy to carry any unproductive members of the team and she was asked to leave only a month after joining.

Developing the organisational model

By this time, we had a basic business plan down on paper and had written a draft constitution for a co-operative. In developing a structure for the organisation we wanted to achieve a number of things:
1. An organizational model that would reflect our vision for a socially just and environmentally sustainable world – so that we would practice what we preach.
2. Non-profit status to gain good will with industry to enable us to collect discard materials easily;
3. Constitutional requirement that any surplus (profits) be used to support Friends of the Earth;
4. A legal model that would enable us to enter into the kind of contracts that we would need to enter (ie long term lease on property);
5. A model whereby decision making rights and responsibilities are balanced (where the people who are doing the work are the ones that make the decisions about the work);
6. A flat structure where everyone would be paid the same and where there would be a sharing of conceptual and rote work;
7. A non-hierarchical decision making model that would both require and lead to full creative participation of everyone involved;

After also looking at the legal frameworks allowed under the Corporations Act and the Incorporated Associations Act, we decided to register as a Co-operative under the recently revised QLD Co-operatives Act.

The organizational decision making model was roughly based on the consensus model used by Friends of Earth – although the details of this model were cause for some considerable conflict.

I was proposing a consensus model whereby if consensus is not reached, a majority of 75% could approve the decision at a subsequent meeting. However, Peter was insisting that we should have a consensus decision making model without any democratic fallback. I argued that this would allow a minority (in fact a single individual) to effectively veto any decision and to bring the organisation to a standstill.

After several weeks of arguing, neither of us was budging an inch. It ended with Peter deciding that he could no longer be part of the project. Sarah, one of the other new recruits from the Courier Mail ad left with him. Mitch also left around this point – for personal health reasons.

We finalized the constitution and submitted a draft to the Co-operatives unit at the Office of Fair Trading. They hated it. We went backwards and forwards arguing over interpretations of the Co-ops Act. The main difficulties were our lack of Managing Director, and the consensus model. The final differences were negotiated (with quite a few compromises on our side – which turned out to be inconsequential) with the help of Anthony Esposito (long term co-op advocate) who effectively mediated between myself and the co-op unit.

Reverse Garbage Co-op Ltd. was officially registered in November 1998, almost a year after the idea was first developed.

Growing the team – stage 3

After Peter and Sarah left, we started to look for a couple of replacements. Lisa had met a local artist who worked with recycled materials and who was interested in getting involved with Reverse Garbage. Her and Lena had a meeting with him to check out his work and to talk to him about his ideas. Timo Mehlem was invited to meet the rest of the team and shortly afterwards was asked if he wanted to be part of the soon to be formed Reverse Garbage Co-operative.

Around this time, I had been starting to do some theoretical work on sustainability and resource efficiency and through this had begun working with Brenton Fletcher who was soon to finish his PHD in Chemical Engineering, researching conceptual models of sustainability in plastics recycling. Brenton was keen to get involved in something practical and we still needed one more person. After another informal interview in our meeting room above the West End library, Brenton was invited to join the team.

We still needed one more person – preferably someone very practical to help with maintenance and building projects, and running the truck. Robbie Lea, a friend who I had known from forest blockades, was in town and at a loose end. After coming along to an informal interview at one of our weekly meetings we invited him to be part of the team.

Fundraising

From the outset we took a very broad view of fundraising. We were very clear about defining our requirements. Do we need money or do we need a particular thing? In some cases (insurance, licences, fees) we were very clearly going to need money. In other cases we reaslised that it would probably be easier to find somebody to donate the particular thing that we needed than to raise the money.

The budget in the business plan made the assumption that no wages would be paid for the first 12 months of operation. The only wages would be from the NEIS payments – a living wage.

The other start up costs were estimated at around $33,000. This was a very very tight budget that assumed that many of our core operational tools would be donated (desks, computers etc.). We started looking for our core infrastructure and for sources of funds.

The infrastructure side was relatively easy. We soon had a phone system, computers, all the office furniture we could dream of, a pallet jack (freshly refurbished by the firm that donated it) and a donation of 150 wheelie bins from the plastics company that made them. We worked all of our personal networks very hard – and we made brilliant and inspired sales pitches.

The money side was more difficult. We approached ethical investment organisations for grants or no-interest loans. We approached the Brisbane City Council and the State Government. We spoke with private philanthropists. We got nothing. Without a track record, nobody was willing to invest.

After lengthy deliberation we applied for a $15,000 grant from the Gaming Machine Community Benefit Fund with which to purchase a truck and lifting equipment. The Grant came through and we were able to purchase our core operating asset. (Note: We refused to apply to the Jupiters Casino Fund as this was seen as a PR fund for the gambling industry. The prevailing argument about the The Gaming Machine Community Benefit Fund was that it is really a form of tax on gambling that effectively goes into consolidated revenue of the State Government.)

So we had $15,000 but still needed another $18,000. The remaining funds were cobbled together with loans from the members of the co-op. We had no other option and decided that a personal commitment of $2000 each would help us to sharpen our focus and our commitment. Some of us had to borrow money from friends or relatives, but in the end we had loans from six of the members, plus an extra loan of $6000 from me. We had a total of $33,000 in the bank.

Finding a property

Finding a property proved to be a much more difficult task. John Gower and I spent countless hours driving around the suburbs of Brisbane. In many ways this is where a lot of the real planning for the business took place – arguing and debating different ideas, solving problems and brainstorming while we drove around looking at properties. We decided to aim high and asked the local council to give us a large inner city property for a peppercorn rent. They refused. We kept looking for months all over Brisbane – from the inner city to the outer lying industrial areas.

One day Timo called and said he had been to a clearance sale at a local West End commercial property that he thought would be ideal. We went and checked it out – it was perfect. We contacted the owners and John Gower started the negotiations. We wanted a 3+3+3 lease to give us the security we needed. They were insisting on directors guarantees for the loan. Only Lena and John owned their houses – the combined assets of the rest of us amounted to a few bicycles, musical instruments and a few tools – so directors guarantees were not going to work because it would mean some directors would bear far more responsibility (and risk) than others. John did a brilliant job. If it wasn’t for his steadfast confidence and brilliant negotiation skills we probably would never have got the lease. We ended up with a 3+3+3 lease, with no directors guarantees, and three months rent free from the date we opened the doors.

Meanwhile I started talking to some local town planners to make sure that we could get the necessary council approval for the project. John Panaretos from Urban Strategies donated considerable time to help us negotiate the maze of council regulations. To be prudent we decided that it would be best to invite Tim Quinn (who was then a local Councilor and head of the Council Planning Committee) down to the warehouse to explain the project.

An operational plan

So we had the concept, the legal structure, the money and the property. The next thing we needed was an operational plan and an organisational process to make it all happen.

We adoped an organisation model developed by Stafford Beer – a British management theorist and systems thinker. He had developed the ‘Viable Systems Model’ (VSM) based on observations about how the human body (and in fact any living system) functions. He identified the key requirements of viability in any system and had put this into concepts for organisations.

The organizational functioning of Reverse Garbage was developed to reflect this model. We had board meetings and we had operational meetings. We identified the key operational areas (resource acquisition, warehouse operations, sales, PR, admin and finance, legal) and allocated responsibility for each area to different people. We each wrote our own job descriptions (both for the start up phase and then ongoing) as well as individual work plans which were then agreed by the group.

We made sure that there was a reasonably sharing of jobs. Everyone was on the roster to clean the toilet at least once each week, and everyone had to do some stints in sales and sorting. By the same token, everyone had some sort of conceptual work as part of their job description. (Michael Albert in his work on Participatory Economics calls this concept “balanced job complexes” - see www.parecon.org ).

We moved into the property in mid January and we set a launch date for the end of March. We had two and half months to deck out the warehouse and collect enough stock for it to be worthwhile opening. The work plan was written into a gannt chart that was kept on the wall in the office so that we could all track our progress in the lead up to the opening.

We bought the truck the same week that we moved into the warehouse. The first thing we had to do was clean the warehouse out. There were piles of junk from the previous occupants – some of which was useful to us as future products, some of which was sent to landfill. We had to remove dust extraction equipment, scrub floors, design and build a material handling system, move walls, build shop counters…

I was living in a share house at the time. Every day I would leave for work before anyone else had woken up, and I would get home after they were all in bed. I think I must have worked about 16 hours a day every day for six months. So did everybody else.

Friends of the Earth decided to move into the house next door. We negotiated a deal with the owners whereby we would have 18 months rent free in return for refurbishing the inside of the building. So while Reverse Garbage was getting ready to start business, a wonderful team of activists were turning their hand to renovating what was soon to become the new FoE Brisbane office.

The birth of a new economy – our first income

The previous occupant of 296 Montague Road was an electric lighting company. They had left behind mountains of partially cut and folded sheet metal. Some of this was useful to us, but most of it was destined for recycling. Timo, Robbie, Brenton and I spent two days sorting through the piles and loading the truck with scrap steel in preparation for what was going to be our first trip to the recycling depot - and our first ever income.

Brenton and I tied down the load and headed off to the SimsMetal yard in Rocklea. We drove through the weighbridge and out into the scrap yard. It took about half an hour to throw the steel off the truck. It was a stinking hot January day – we were dripping sweat, filthy and feeling proud. We had all been working our arses off and today would be the start of a new economy – redefining waste as a valuable resource! We drove through the weighbridge on the way out and Brenton went in to collect our fee. We’d been guessing how much it might be - $50? $200?

Brenton came back looking puzzled. “How much did we get?” I asked. “Three forty” he said. “Three hundred and forty bucks!” I thought to myself, “Whoopiee!”

Brenton clarified, “Ummmm…well actually it was three dollars and forty cents.” I couldn’t belive it. “No way – you’ve got to be kidding – they must have got it wrong. Go back and check.” So Brenton went back in – only to confirm that our two days work had earned us a massive $3.40. It is hard to convey the sense of outrage that we felt. It was starting to dawn on us why there were so few recycling businesses.

We stopped at the drive through bottleshop on the way back to the warehouse and asked for two light beers. “That’ll be $3.40” said the attendant. “Of course,” I said, somehow managing to enjoy the irony. When we got back to the warehouse we had to tell the others. “Sorry guys but we pissed our first income up against the wall”.

Opening the doors and winning awards

After three months of work we opened our doors with a singing, dancing performance that managed to get state wide TV coverage and launched Reverse Garbage successfully into the world. It was incredible to see the amount of support that we received from the local community. Materials poured in, artists offered their services, volunteers were knocking at our door, newspapers and radio stations agreed to cover our story.

During the opening months, Judy Gower joined the Reverse Garbage team, as did Sandy McBride who started to develop our environmental education programmes. Before our first year was out, we were awarded the “New Small Business of the Year” award by Quest Newspapers. It was a wonderful validation from the ‘mainstream’ after months of tireless work. John Gower summed it up well when he said, “We didn’t know that it would be impossible, so we just got on and did it.”

After 12 months the NEIS programme ended and the business was earning enough to replace this living wage – and actually increase it slightly. We developed a budgeting model whereby our annual budget was divided by 52 to give a weekly budget. Any weekly income that was over this budget level was divided up and paid out as wages. This meant that our wages fluctuated anywhere from $6 per hour up to $15 per hour. It was direct and immediate feedback on our performance and ensured that we were all focused on the business of becoming financially viable. Other cash flow fluctuations were managed with a buffer of about $5,000 left over from the start up. Gradually our wages increased over time – edging ever closer to the holy grail of a consistent $15 per hour wage.

A lingering question of equity

When planning the business we realized that, during the start up phase we would not be able to afford to pay people a wage that reflected either the value of their work or the sacrifice they would make. However, we believed that the business would be successful and that, after several years, employees/members of Reverse Garbage would be earning a reasonable living. This created an obvious disequity. The people who had the initiative and drive to start the business would not be financially compensated/rewarded, while people who walked into the business after several years would be paid well from day one.

In order to solve this problem, we devised a model of deferred payment, whereby a portion of unpaid wages were accrued as a debt that could be claimed against Reverse Garbage at some future date. We realised that this debt could not be instantly recallable, otherwise Reverse Garbage would technically be insolvent and the directors would have a fiduciary duty to close the business. The deferred wages system that we arrived at basically involves the formal acknowledgement of the unpaid wages, along with contracts with each of the involved people that outline the terms of repayment. Put simply, if Reverse Garbage does not have the money to repay these wages then it will not be forced to jeopardise it’s ongoing viability to do so. However, if the surplus is there, the back wages debts must be repaid. Alternatively, the back-wages may be able to be claimed in materials instead of cash although this raises practical difficulties in relation to income tax.

This system created an enormous headache with our auditors – and was at least in part responsible for a less than amicable end to our relationship with them. On the otherhand, putting these debts on the public record means that Reverse Garbage is publicly and legally committed to honoring them and ensuring that the principles of equity, which are so clearly written in it’s constitution, are upheld.

In order for equity to prevail, the sacrifice and benefits accrued by the founding members need to be placed in the context of the sacrifice and benefits being accrued by the current generation of co-op members – according to the general guide of ensuring no undue privilege and no undue penalty.
Key lessons learnt

Don’t undercapitalise

The real cost of starting up Reverse Garbage wasn’t $33,000. It was $33,000 plus $110,000 in unpaid wages, plus countless hours of volunteer effort, plus the goodwill of the local community. Even $143,000 is ridiculously cheap for a business that employs 6 people in a self-managed work environment doing something that is benefiting the environment and the local community. It works out to be somewhere around $25,000 per job – for good quality jobs that people feel proud to do. It would be cheap at ten times the price.

Compare this to all of the talk of ‘sustainable job creation’ by the big end of town. When government agencies talk about job creation, they talk about schemes involving millions of dollars – where the cost per job is in the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Reverse Garbage in Brisbane has proved that, if done properly, resource recovery can be a very cost effective way of creating employment. The challenge is to attract sufficient start up funding so that the founders don’t all burn out from over work/under pay and thereby jeopardise the viability of the business.
In retrospect, we needed at least $200,000 to start Reverse Garbage. If we had access to this kind of capital, the organisation would still be paying it off, but would probably have had a much smoother start up – with less staff turnover.

High staff turnover has been debilitating for the organisation and made the start up process much more stressful than it would otherwise have been. The lack of start up capital and the corresponding low, unpredictable wages also meant that people with kids and mortgages were selected against – in preference for younger people with no dependents/commitments (and perhaps less useful experience).

A recurring theme in environmentally focused organisations and co-ops is that staff tend to be overqualified (ie. University graduates or activists with a philosophical commitment to the ideals of the organisation). However, hiring overqualified workers can be just as big a problem as hiring underqualified workers. Small organisations simply cannot afford the high costs of continually having to recruit and train new people so it is important to find people that are well suited to the work (as well as having a commitment to the values/ideals of the organisation) and that will stick around for the long term.

Adequate capitalisation would also have meant that a lot of time and headaches would have been saved in terms of setting up the backwages system – which has turned out to be quite a problem, not only for the tax office and the auditors but also for subsequent generations of directors who are faced with a balance sheet in which liabilities (although not current) far outweigh assets.

Skills deficit and external directors

Reverse Garbage was an experiment in quite a radical model of worker self-management. In order to be on the board of RG you need to work in the organisation. And if you work there you are required to become a director and to accept legal responsibility for the whole organisation. This is a significant departure from the standard model of having external boards – which might usually have one staff representative at most. It has the advantage that the people who are actually doing the work have control over their work. However it has the disadvantage that without outside input it can become very self referential.

Reverse Garbage faces the reality of all small businesses – too much work and not enough time or money. Organisations of that size generally cannot afford to pay people to sit around pondering the future. It also faces the reality of all progressive organisations that are struggling to survive in a capitalist economy – with relentless pressure to compromise values and principles in the face of perceived economic necessity.

With a pretty lean operation, it can be difficult to bring people into the organisation that have the skills that are required to run a $300,000 a year business and that also are keen to do hands on work, clean the toilets, and serve customers, and who share the values of co-operation and environmental sustainability. The common solution to this problem is to put all of the conceptual work into one job description and to employ a manager (usually on a higher pay scale than everyone else) that monopolises all of the interesting work while everybody else does the slightly less challenging but no less important work of running the actual business. However, this undermines real workplace democracy.

Training

In order to maintain a system of balanced job complexes and to bring necessary skills and experience into the organisation, there are a couple of other mechanisms that can be used. One is to invest seriously in training – so that all staff are given a real opportunity to develop the skills required to manage and to govern the organisation. This is expensive, but it needs to be done for a worker-managed model to survive. In order for people to participate meaningfully and constructively in the governance of any business (or any organisation with significant financial turnover), they need to understand financial management, and they need a basic understanding of their legal responsibilities.

In order to participate effectively in an egalitarian, worker managed co-operative, people also need to have a good understanding of decision making processes, group dynamics and must have a good understanding of the ideas, values and principles that underpin the organisation and it’s mission. This doesn’t happen by accident – it requires clear training and rigorous induction processes if it is to be done well.

External directors

Another mechanism, which can complement good training is to introduce a limited number of external directors on the board. These directors could rotate from year to year depending on what skills are required – and can provide a much needed external perspective. The presence of external directors does not necessarily threaten the integrity of the worker management model so long as their number is not sufficient to veto decisions.

Prioritise and focus

Looking back, I realise that we were insane. At one point, a little more than 12 months after starting the business, I was investigating setting up an environmental printing business, a second hand clothes shop, a bicycle recycling business, a printer cartridge recycling business, doing a feasibility study into solvent recycling, setting up an eco-efficiency consulting branch of Reverse Garbage, and doing a paper recycling research project for the Brisbane City Council. And the rest of the members of Reverse Garbage let me get away with it.

The lesson is simple - you need to keep your main thing your main thing. Decide on the priorities and then focus on them. Set SMART objectives (Strategic, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, Time bound) and stick to them. Prioritise and focus.

Accountability

There can often be a clash of cultures between grassroots environmental activists and business people. In part it is due to different values, but also different cultures. Many business people appreciate the need to radically reduce our environmental impact, just as many activists appreciate the need for economic activity in order to generate livelihoods for people.

This clash of cultures and values has played out repeatedly within Reverse Garbage and at times led to debilitating interpersonal conflicts that were not dealt with constructively. I’ll discuss only one aspect of this clash – around the issue of accountability.

If an organisation is going to be effective and efficient, there needs to be a high degree of accountability of the people involved. Roles need to be clearly defined and people need to be accountable for their performance. Organisations have rules/procedures for good reasons and for these to work effectively there needs to be some level of accountability against these rules/procedures.

In Reverse Garbage, we wanted to walk the line between clear accountability and having a nurturing, respectful working environment. We were trying to operate with a non-hierarchical organisational model while also acknowledging vastly different levels of experience, skills and probably most importantly, confidence.

A recurring discussion that we had during the first year was around the old saying “No socialism without discipline”. Putting it another way - you need to have discipline before you can have freedom. The contrasting view is most eloquently articulated by Mikhail Bakunin: “Freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity is achieved.”

By getting bogged down in philosophical discussions, and by focusing on differences in cultures/workstyles, we failed to develop an effective model of accountability that was clear and timely. This isn’t to say that we didn’t have any accountability mechanisms at all, far from it, but problems/issues often became politicised rather than being dealt with as operational issues, which they often were. There were real political issues too, but these were generally resolved easily and amicably.

A dynamic that often exists in community organisations (as well as many other organisations) is what is sometimes called a ‘culture of applause’, whereby everyone is always wanting to be nice to each other and to pat each other on the back even if the thing in question is of dubious standard. Sure, it is great to be nice to each other, but this doesn’t need to come at the expense of having real accountability mechanisms – otherwise ‘nice’ become an acronym for “Not Insightful or Critical Enough’.

There have been a number of major interpersonal conflicts since the start of Reverse Garbage. These conflicts have generally not been managed in a clear, direct and timely way – leading to significant acrimony. A more robust culture of accountability would probably have helped us to deal with these conflicts better and would have forced issues to be resolved rather than being swept under the rug and allowed to grow.

So is it a viable model?

Today, Reverse Garbage is a reasonably healthy organisation that employs 5-6 people full time and turns over around $300,000 per year. It diverts around 2 tonnes of re-useable materials away from Brisbane landfills each year and it makes these available at low cost to the local community. It also exposes thousands of people each year to the idea that ‘Waste is something we DO, not something that IS’.

Reverse Garbage has achieved a lot but is still far from reaching it’s full potential as a catalyst for change towards a more sustainable society.

It has shown that you don’t need government funding to set up viable re-use businesses. It has also shown that you don’t need a manager to operate viable co-operative businesses. There are some processes that Reverse Garbage have developed that could well be used by other organisations to good effect. There are other processes and practices that should probably never be replicated.

Hopefully this case study has allowed readers to understand how Reverse Garbage was established, what worked and what didn’t. Ideally it will catalyse discussion and debate, and provide some useful food for thought for others who are considering establishing environmentally focused organisations that also wish to embody workplace democracy and worker self-management.

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Since 1998, Reverse Garbage Co-op has been diverting re-useable materials away from landfills and making them available at low cost to the local community. It has an annual turnover of around $300,000 per annum, employs 5-6 people, and is financially self- sustaining. It operates as a not-for-profit worker managed co-operative with a flat organisational structure. It was started with total capital input of just $33,000.

John Hepburn was the initiator and co-founder of Reverse Garbage Co-op Ltd. He was involved from the initial concept development in January 1998 until he resigned as a member in March 2002. This is a personal reflection which may not represent the views of others involved in Reverse Garbage either now or during it’s start up phase.

For more information about Reverse Garbage, visit www.reversegarbage.com.au

Reclaiming commons - old and new

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 14:39:00 +0000

The law will jail the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leave the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose

I was lying in bed the other morning, listening to the radio news. On came the soothing and comforting voice of our Prime Minister, John Howard. In amongst his posturing about some issue or another, he said “Nothing is ever free – and nor should it be.” It rolled off his tongue like a truism. Sure - nothing is ever free – and nor should it be. Actually, lots of things used to be free – and some things still are. Others should be. They’re called commons.

One of the first and the best books that I’ve ever read about the global environmental and social crisis is a book called “Whose Common Future” by the publishers of The Ecologist. It is a scathing response to the Brundtland Report titled “Our Common Future” – which resulted from the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (UNCED – United Nations Conference on Environment and Development).

There is a quote from the book that sticks in my mind as one of the best summaries of the essence of commons, and of the struggle to defend them:

The best that can be said for the Earth Summit is that it made visible the vested interests standing in the way of the moral economies which local people, who daily face the consequences of environmental degradation, are seeking to re-establish. The spectacle of the great and good at UNCED casting about for “solutions” that will keep their power and standards of living intact has confirmed the scepticism of those whose fate and livelihoods were being determined… For them, the question is not how their environment should be managed – they have the experience of the past as their guide – but who will manage it and in whose interest.

The key question remains – who makes the decisions and in whose interests – and for me, this speaks to the essence of what is important about commons.

A common is a resource (be it physical, spatial, conceptual) that is managed by the community, for the community. The contentious question then becomes ‘who is the community’. The answer invariably depends on the resource in question.

There is a widely held, and somewhat romantic myth that ‘commons’, by definition, have no boundaries, and are open to all. However, if we look at the most commonly celebrated example of commons, we see that this wasn’t generally the case. In the common lands of England, the common was managed by the community for the community. But the community didn’t extend to everyone in the world, or even to everyone in England. It was a common for a particular geographical community of people. The management of common was mediated by the social relationships between the people within the community. Everyone in that community benefited from the common, and they therefore had a stake in its management. But people were accountable for their use (or mis-use) of the common through the social relationships in the community in which they lived.

Commons are fundamentally about people being able to access resources and to make decisions about those resources to the extent that they are affected by those decisions. If you aren’t going to be impacted by a decision, then you have no right to participate. If you are impacted, then you do have a right. In this way, commons are a very real embodiment of direct, participatory democracy and of self-management.

The vexing problem that commons pose to capitalism is that commons are not owned by anyone. If something isn’t able to be owned, how can you put a value on it? If something doesn’t have a market value, how can you steal it? Or more to the point, why would you want to steal it if you can’t sell it to somebody else later at a higher price? If it can be said that capitalism has an essence, then the vast body of empirical evidence over the past century points to that essence being the appropriation of wealth from the many by the few. Of course, appropriation is just a polite word for theft. And the process of theft is necessarily preceded by a process of enclosure – of putting boundaries around, and values upon resources.

The enclosure of the commons in England has been widely documented. In order to undo the system of commons that supported so many rural communities in England, the aristocracy introduced a series of ‘enclosure bills’ that effectively put boundaries around – or enclosed – land in order that it could have a defined value and be redistributed as private property.

So if you’re interested in predicting where the next big transfer of wealth from public to private hands is going to happen, you need to look for processes of enclosure. In 17th and 18th century England it was the enclosure of common lands. Today, the enclosure of commons, and the defense of commons looks very different.

Many of the important struggles over commons today relate to cutting edge technologies in information technology, biotechnology and nanotechnology. In times gone by, land was the primary basis of economic wealth. Hence the importance of controlling land. Today, the basis of wealth in our economy has shifted and continues to shift. We moved from the Agricultural revolution in the 18th century (accompanied by the enclosure of common lands) to the industrial revolution in the 19th century (accompanied by the development of a patent system for intellectual property), to the information revolution in the 20th century (with an expansion of the patent and intellectual property system) and now the biotechnology and nanotechnology revolutions – accompanied by patents on life and now patents on matter.

As the basis of economic wealth has become more mobile and more global, the struggle over the commons has also become more global. The global nature of information and trade, as well as the emergence of global environmental problems such as climate change and the hole in the ozone layer, create another layer of complexity and abstraction in terms of the management, enclosure or defense of commons.

When we think of defending the commons today, the first image that springs to mind is a historically rooted one – of the landless people of Brazil occupying private farms to reclaim them for food production. But a lot of the key contemporary struggles are far less romantic than this - and the politics less obvious.

The internet is a newly created common – the most celebrated part of which is the ‘open source software’ movement. This is a common that is under threat in a variety of ways that technological illiterates such as myself can only barely understand.

Broadband and radio frequencies? Who gets to define who has access to these common resources and at what price, and in whose interest? Large corporations didn’t get virtually exclusive access to the airwaves by osmosis. They did it by establishing rules, defining boundaries – by a process of enclosure that has resulted in exclusive access rights for the already powerful media conglomerates.

The biotechnology revolution has been hyped up to be the next industrial revolution – and it was preceded by the development of patents on life. Like other examples, the enclosure happened without much media fanfare, most people didn’t hear about it and many still don’t know about it now.

The idea of patents and of intellectual property has been around for a very long time. Galileo received a patent in 1594 for his horse-driven water pump. Cooks were granted one year monopolies over new recipes in the 7th century B.C. The right to a copyright or patent is the only right included in the body of the US constitution (the Bill of rights was adopted later as a separate document). What is new is the degree to which patents (monopolies) have been extended.

The boundaries were gradually pushed. In 1873, Loius Pasteur was awarded US patent No.141,072 for a strain of yeast – the first of several patents for life forms. However the patent was for the use of the organism within a process, not just the organism itself.

In 1972, a researcher with General Electric filed for a patent in the US on a genetically engineered soil micro-organism that was useful for cleaning oil spills. Finally, after various rejections and appeals by the parts of the US patent office, in 1980, the US Supreme court, in a 5:4 ruling (Diamond vs Chakrabarty), affirmed that a living, human-modified organism is patentable[1]. In 1988, the first patent was granted on a living animal – the Harvard Oncomouse[2].

The extension of patents to cover living organisms – and parts thereof – has laid the groundwork for the next big heist. The biodiversity that the capitalist industrialist system has spent the last 100 or so years trying frantically to destroy, is now regarded as the basis for the next industrial revolution and is rapidly increasing in value. The framework for enclosure is in place and our genetic heritage – the biological diversity that is and that sustains the richness of life on planet earth - is now up for grabs. Research teams of some of the world’s largest corporations are scouring the surface of the earth for potentially valuable genetic property and taking patents on anything from cell lines from indigenous people in Papua New Guinea, to seeds of staple food crops.

Food is an interesting example. Most people don’t really think of food as a common. To be truthful, most people in our culture don’t really think about where their food comes from at all. But most of the basic foods that we eat today have been developed over thousands of years by peasant farmers in different parts of the world. It’s true to say that food grows on trees, but most foods didn’t just develop by accident – they were actively bred. The genetic diversity of our foods is really a common. It has been managed through reciprocal relationships between farmers for millennia – growing, developing and sharing seeds.

The combination of plant breeder rights and patents on life has enabled food to be at least partially enclosed and privatized. The development of genetically engineered foods and in particular, ‘terminator technology’ (breeding sterile seeds) is the extreme example.

But the process of enclosure and commodification of food is also strongly supported, and in some ways even led by a process of enclosing our imagination – of shifting our desires and the way that we think about food.

Wholefoods are part of our common heritage – they are difficult to enclose (notwithstanding the aggressive attempts to do so) because they grow freely on trees and in the earth. However, if corporations can create a demand, indeed an addiction, for processed, synthesized foods that cannot be replicated easily by everyday people – they can be trademarked or have some other form of monopoly protection. So the process of enclosure of our food commons proceeds not only through the increasing monopoly control over seeds – but also through the social control of how we think about food and the kinds of food that we want to eat – by limiting our collective imagination.

For example, many people are no longer willing to eat fruit with blemishes, or vegetables with worms. Indeed fruit and vegetables themselves are off the menu for an increasing number of people whose sustenance derives almost exclusively from highly processed industrial foods. A similar shift is also evident in countries such as India where the majority of people currently exist outside of the formal food economy (ie they grow their own food, and trade within their community) but where corporate marketing is being used effectively to encourage people to abandon traditional food systems and adopt much more passive roles as consumers of industrial food.

Our current industrial food system represents an unprecedented human experiment, whereby virtually an entire generation will grow up with only a cursory understanding of where their food comes from, and will be largely unable to produce their own food. As time progresses, the limiting of our imagination will be reinforced by the limiting of our lived experience and our skills, ensuring the effective privatization of food – through either legalized monopolies or through, as Vandana Shiva would say, ‘monocultures of the mind’.

The latest frontier is the patenting of matter – of the building blocks of our universe – in order to pave the way for investment in the nanotechnology revolution. There are already existing patents on elements (Americium and Curium – granted to Glenn Seaborg) and it is commonly agreed that you can secure patents even on an existing element.

Scientists are manipulating matter at the nano scale (one billionth of a metre) and finding that common materials assume radically different properties. Much as with genetic engineering, they argue that nano materials are new and different in order to secure patents, but then argue that the materials are in fact the same everyday stuff we’ve been using for millennia in order to avoid regulation and safety testing. So far this strategy seems to be working.

The launching pad of the global nanotechnology industry is being built with around 3,000 new nanopatents a year – around 90% of which are applied for in the USA. If previous technological revolutions are anything to go by, the nanotechnology revolution will once again result in the wholesale transferal of wealth from the many to the few – as further commons are enclosed and appropriated.

The struggle of commons against enclosure is an ongoing, historical struggle. The terrain is shifting…from land, to ideas, food, water…to the very building blocks of life and matter. Amongst the new enclosures, however, there is a resurgence in the creation of new commons – of creative commons – and networks of resistance. The open source software movement has defied critics and emerged as a potent economic and political counter to Microsoft and other monopoly patents. And like the fence jumpers and squatters of the physical world, the cyber world has given expression to thousands of creative ways of undermining intellectual property.

Our challenge is to resist the enclosure of our imagination….to imagine new ways of reclaiming and creating commons. For the commons are not static. There is no fixed quantity of common. They are created and renewed endlessly by people in communities the world over. Woven like an endless, shifting tapestry. We need to be bold enough to remember our common heritage. We need to look for emerging enclosures and name them for what they are – theft. And we need to imagine not only our common futures, but also our future commons.

As a celebration of the resistance that is already happening, I’d like to share a poem that captures the spirit of the creative commons – an open source poem…

This poem is copyleft,
you are free to distribute it, and diffuse it
dismantle it, and abuse it
reproduce it, and improve it
and use it
for your own ends
and with your own ending

This is an open source poem
Entering the public domain
Here's the source code,
the rest remains
for you to shape, stretch and bend
add some salt and pepper if you want
share it out amongst your friends

Because I didn't write this poem, I molded it.
picked up the lines out of a skip and refolded it
as I was walking on over here,
rescued leftover ideas,
on their way to landfill,
found screwed up fragments
and found them a use.

Because, think about it
I can't tell you anything truly new.
There can only be few more new ideas to be thought through.
So should we treat them as rare commodities, high value oddities?
Probe the arctic reserves and other sensitive ecologies
for new ideas buried deep beneath the permafrost?
hunt them out of the cultures till the cultures are lost?
then suffocate them with patent protection?
No! we should re use and recycle them
Pile our public spaces high with ideas beyond anyone's imagining..

So I steal a riff here and a rhyme there,
a verse here and a line there
pass them on around the circle,
roll the words, add a joke
here go on.. have a toke,
does it get you high?

This poem is indebted to Abbie Hoffman, Gil Scott Heron, Jim Thomas and Sarah Jones,
This poem is indebted to all the words I've read and the voices I've known
This poem is a composite of intellect, yours and mine.
This poem is RIPPED OFF! every single time

Because intellectual property is theft
and piracy our only defence left against the thought police.
when no thought is new
its just rewired, refined, remastered and reproduced
The revolution will be plagiarised
The revolution will not happen if our ideas are corporatised.
So STEAL THIS POEM
Take it and use it
for your own ends
and with your own ending

This poem is copyleft,
All rights are reversed

(stolen from Claire Fauset)

Biotech battle looms in Asia

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 14:14:00 +0000

Far Eastern Economic Review - July 2005

For over four millennia, alchemists have sought to transform ordinary metals into gold. Today, it seems that a new alchemy has finally arrived to make our wildest dreams come true—genetic engineering is set to solve the problems of our age, with a long line of promises that range from the utopian to the truly bizarre.

Drought tolerant, pest resistant, crops that are rich in omega-3 essential fatty acids, will help the rich lose weight and help the poor overcome malnutrition. Researchers in Japan are reportedly developing a soy bean that includes an antihair loss gene. Apparently, the addition of human genes to rice makes it resistant to 13 different varieties of herbicide. Miracle solutions abound. But how real are the promises and what are the risks? And how are the benefits and risks of this technology shared by the wider community?

With entrenched positions on either side of the Atlantic Ocean, centre stage of the genetically engineered (ge) food debate is shifting to Asia, where most countries are developing ge varieties of crops ranging from rice to papaya, corn and potato. Among the myriad of research trials, the proposed introduction of ge rice in China is the key threshold issue. Rice is the world’s most important staple food crop and forms the basis of the diet in many countries. Up until now, no country has ever allowed their major staple food crop to be genetically engineered on a wide scale.

Corn, soy beans, canola and cotton make up the bulk of ge crops and are used mostly in animal feed. A smaller proportion goes into highly processed foods. Even the U.S.—where the growing of ge foods is widespread—has so far stopped short of introducing ge rice, even though regulatory approvals have been granted.

Proponents of ge crops are hoping that China will soon adopt ge rice, giving a green light to other Asian countries, and providing the silver bullet that overcomes global opposition to ge foods. However, to date Chinese officials have been circumspect about the applications while they consider the health and environmental risks, as well as market implications. The Chinese government is well aware that should it approve ge rice, it will be entering unknown territory in terms of exposing its population to the risks inherent in ge technology.

So why all the fuss? There are fundamental objections to the release of ge organisms into the environment and food chain, based on environmental and health risks. Many consumers simply don’t like the idea of scientists and chemical companies mucking around with their food, others have ethical or religious objections. Farmers are concerned about patent issues and the increasing corporate control over seeds and farming. And a large number of food companies have decided that the risk of consumer rejection of their products outweighs any potential benefits of ge foods and have joined the anti-ge camp.

There are many interesting and important developments in molecular biology that may help to improve the way we understand and interact with our environment—including many applications of agricultural biotechnology that hold real promise. However ge is only one specific application that results from this wider field of scientific inquiry. It is a crude technology, based on outdated science and carries with it environmental and health risks that are inherent in the ge process. As Barry Commoner, senior scientist at City University of New York said in his essay “Unraveling the dna Myth”:

The [genetic engineering] industry is based on science that is 40 years old and conveniently devoid of more recent results, which show that there are strong reasons to fear the potential consequences of transferring a dna gene between species. What the public fears is not the experimental science but the fundamentally irrational decision to let it out of the laboratory into the real world before we truly understand it.

Claims are regularly made about the safety of ge foods but these are more often made by plant breeders than by public health experts. The notion that “people have been eating ge foods for years and nobody has got sick” is utter nonsense as anyone who knows the first thing about public health will know. There is no monitoring system in place to identify any negative health impacts of ge foods anywhere in the world, and any unexpected effects are likely to be subtle and long term. Put simply, if you don’t look for problems you will be unlikely to find them. The British Medical Association recently observed that “the few robust studies that have looked for health effects have been short term and specific. There is a lack of evidence-based research with regard to medium- and long-term effects on health.”

If recent understandings of biological complexity and genetics were applied, ge crops would be discarded to the dustbin of history. The problem is that there has been such a large financial, intellectual and emotional investment in ge that the normal scientific process has been suspended and many institutions have locked themselves in to pushing this outdated technology at the expense of investing in other less risky, and perhaps more promising areas of research.

Part of the mythology of ge crops is that they are needed to feed a growing population and solve problems of malnutrition. This no doubt provides a strong motivation for well meaning scientists, but in the realpolitik of the global biotechnology industry, this is little more than a cynical public-relations ploy.

The experience with the world’s most widely grown ge crop, showed that despite claims of increased yield, roundup ready soy yields around 5% less than conventional soy. This data is rarely publicized and claims of increased yield continue despite evidence to the contrary.

The assumption that ge crops will feed the world is even more ill founded. People don’t starve because there isn’t enough food, but because they are poor and are denied access to food. In 2001, the Indian government was sued after allowing grain to rot in government granaries while innumerable starvation deaths were reported throughout the country. Many countries in Europe pay their farmers not to grow food. While in other countries, produce is routinely destroyed due to market failures.

But rather than addressing the causes of malnutrition and hunger, scientists are inventing more far-fetched, high-tech solutions to reinforce and extend a food system that is fundamentally designed to make profits for agribusiness rather than to feed people.

The other tangible argument in favor of ge crops is the notion that they will reduce pesticide use. However there are other, less risky ways to achieve this result. Farmer education and integrated pest management are obvious starting points.

The push to introduce ge rice in China and Asia seems to be driven more by the needs of the industry than by any real analysis of the problems. For example, the variety of ge rice that is first in line for approval is bacterial blight (bb) resistant rice, yet in China, bb affects only 1% to 2% of the total rice crop and the Ministry of Agriculture has not conducted any national bb infection forecast in the past two years since the disease is no longer considered to be a serious problem. In any case, there are several other promising solutions to bb available, including the use of other non-breeding methods such as crop rotation and increasing crop biodiversity.

While the regulators evaluate the risks of ge rice, Chinese scientists appear to have been taking the issue into their own hands. A number of research trials have been taking place over recent years and new evidence suggests that some of these trials may have spread out of control.

Greenpeace found ge rice available for sale in the markets in the Chinese province of Hubei. The rice was labeled as “pest resistant” rice and testing by international laboratory Genescan confirmed that the rice was in fact ge rice. Based on interviews with farmers and around 20 positive tests from numerous sources, Greenpeace estimates that between 950 and 1,200 tons of ge rice entered the food chain or rice market after last year’s harvest. This year, it is estimated that up to 13,500 tons may enter the market unless urgent action is taken.

While the Chinese government is conducting investigations into the problem, a number of other countries have begun probes to ensure that imports of Chinese rice have not been inadvertently contaminated. Japan has a zero tolerance for unauthorized ge organisms and according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare’s website, Japanese authorities will begin testing Chinese rice imports. South Korea is also looking into the possible contamination of rice imports.

The push to introduce ge crops in Asia is likely to increase in the future—and the pressure on governments to protect farmers and consumers and their national biosafety will also mount. In many ways, Asia is becoming the meat in the biotech sandwich, with a small number of transnational agrichemical companies aggressively pushing their products in order to break the trans-Atlantic political nexus.

Many industry proponents seem to hold the arrogant and patronizing view that Europeans are the only people who are concerned about the negative impacts of ge crops, and that this is due to some sort of inexplicable, cultural perversion. There seems to be a view that Asian consumers will somehow placidly accept whatever is given to them by the West. The reality is far different as recent consumer polls in Asia testify. A consumer survey in March of this year showed that awareness and concern about ge among Chinese consumers is steadily increasing. According to the survey, which was conducted by Ipsos, an international market research company at the request of Greenpeace, 73% of respondents said they would choose non-ge rice over ge rice.

Testing of products on Chinese supermarket shelves earlier this year found that several international brands that have GE -free policies in Europe, are using unlabelled ge ingredients in China—a clear case of double standards. This revelation led to a consumer outcry and resulted in several supermarket chains removing the ge products from shelves.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the biotech industry is not going to be able to use Asia as a dumping ground. Consumer and farmer rejection of ge crops is on the increase, and an increasing number of countries are implementing ge labeling laws that will give the public a right to know and a right to choose what they are eating. The introduction of such laws have been opposed tooth and nail by the U.S. government, and by the industry players who have engaged in an aggressive strategy of market bullying and an almost conscious strategy of contamination. Their intentions are expressed most eloquently by Dale Adolphe, ex-president of the Canola Council of Canada and a vociferous advocate of ge crops: “The total acreage devoted to genetically modified crops around the world is expanding. That may be what eventually brings the debate to an end. It’s a hell of a thing to say that the way we win is don’t give the consumer a choice, but that might be it.”

John Hepburn
Greenpeace International

Questioning Nanotechnology?

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 13:16:00 +0000

It turns out that size really does matter. Or, to be more precise, it’s the size of matter that matters. Scientists are manipulating matter at the nano scale (one billionth of a metre) and finding that common materials assume radically different properties compared to their larger scale counterparts. The new nanotechnology is being heralded as the next industrial revolution that will redefine life as we know it. But who asked for their life to be redefined? I certainly didn’t. Did you?

If you haven’t been asked for your views on nanotechnology yet, you’re in the same position as 99.99% of the rest of the population. And it’s not as though the industry is waiting for any kind of nod of public approval. The launching pad of the global nanotechnology industry is being built with around 3,000 new nanopatents a year. In the US, nanotechnology projects have attracted more than $800 Million in public funds (mostly for military applications), making it largest research project since the Apollo moon shot. Globally, nanotech is estimated to grow to be a US$1 trillion industry by 2011 and Australia is running to catch up - with nanotech strategies and development agencies in most States.

The big deal with nanotechnology is the new properties that emerge when materials are manipulated at the nanoscale. The nano-scale material may be more reactive, have different optical, magnetic and electric properties, and be much stronger or more toxic. The list of research projects and possibilities is seemingly endless. In one of the first high profile examples of nanotechnology, IBM spelled out their corporate logo using xenon atoms to make letters that were 5 nanometres high. To put this in context, a human hair is about 80,000 nanometres wide and a red blood cell roughly 7,000 nanometres wide. So when we’re talking nano, we’re talking very very small.

It seems that the exact definition of nanotechnology shifts depending on who you are speaking to – or more importantly – what questions you are asking. If you’re an investor looking for opportunities, or a researcher looking for corporate backing, then nanotechnology is the most exciting area of cutting edge science that is going to be the basis of the next industrial revolution and will redefine both life and non-life as we know it. If on the otherhand, you happen to be asking about whether or not there needs to be some regulation of the health and environmental impacts of nanotechnology, then you’re likely to be told that nanotechnology doesn’t actually exist. After all, it’s really just the same old physics and chemistry that we’ve been doing for decades that has been ‘rebranded’ to help boost science funding.

Surely the nanotechnology industry can’t have it both ways. Or can they? As with the case of genetically engineered organisms, the industry and scientists have managed to successfully argue that nano materials are new and different in order to secure monopoly patents. And then they have then turned around and argued that the materials are in fact the same everyday stuff we’ve been using for decades so they don’t need regulation or safety testing. To date, no regulation has been required despite considerable evidence that manufactured nanoparticles can be hazardous and warrant extreme caution.

There are a wide range of concerns backed by a slowly increasing body of scientific evidence. The fact that nanoscaled substances have much higher and less predictable reactivities, increases their chances of becoming environmental toxins by enabling them bind to molecules and accumulate in organisms at high rates. Nanoparticles are also starting to raise alarm bells in terms of health impacts. Substances under 70 nm are not recognizable to our bodies’ first line of defense, white blood cells, and therefore pass readily into the bloodstream and consequently to all other parts of the body when inhaled. Researchers working in Oxford and Montreal found that titanium dioxide (currently used in sunscreens) nanoparticles catalyze the formation of free radicals in skin cells, which in turn cause damage to DNA, ultimately becoming carcinogenic. In this case it is possible that in our attempt to prevent skin cancer from excessive sun exposure that cancer will develop instead from the substance used as sunscreen.

In response to these and other concerns, The Royal Society in the UK released a report in 2004 recommending that: until more is known about environmental impacts of nanoparticles and nanotubes, their release into the environment should be avoided as far as possible; and that ingredients in the form of nanoparticles undergo a full safety assessment before they are permitted for use in products.

The problem is that nobody is listening. Products containing nanoparticles are already on the shelves, including sunscreens, cosmetics, car parts and silicon chips, and in the not so distant future we can expect them to also be used in food and pharmaceutical products. There is an urgent and growing regulatory gap where product development is being fast-tracked at the expense of ensuring community health and safety. But it is unclear what it’s going to take to trigger a regulatory response. Recommendations from one of the world’s most conservative and well-respected scientific bodies hasn’t seemed to have had much impact. Perhaps the nanotechnology industry is just waiting for the same kind of public backlash that triggered the regulation and wholesale rejection of genetically engineered foods?

Beyond the immediate health and environmental risks, the more complex and far reaching implications of nanotechnology relate to other issues and products that are a little further up the development pipeline – such as molecular manufacturing techniques for putting together products atom-by-atom, the merging of non-living nano-materials and living organisms, and even self-replicating nano-robots.

These transformative technologies raise serious social, ethical and political questions. In addition to economic upheavals, nano-surveillance and military concerns, new developments and the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence are bringing into question the fundamental relationships that define our society. By blurring the boundary between human and machine they question the very essence of what it is to be a human being.

The transformative power of the new nano and biotechnologies has reached a point where surely it must time for us to take the democratisation of science seriously. Over the past two hundred years, scientists have altered our world in ways that elected officials could only dream of doing. Yet they are accountable to nobody. We need a new way of thinking about science and technology that allows those who are affected by the technology to have a say in it’s development, and that allows the development of technology to be shaped by the needs and aspirations of our community – not the other way around.

This is not a trivial problem by any means. Just as scientists are exploring unchartered territory through the emerging bio and nano technologies, so must we also explore unchartered territory in terms of how these technologies are managed – and crucially, in whose interests.

World Food Day

noreply@blogger.com (John Hepburn) — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 13:02:00 +0000

World Food Day is a time of year to reflect on where our food comes from, on the abundance of food for some, and the lack of access for so many others. It is a time to reflect on the history of food, and the future of food.

The importance of food for our survival, and it’s central role in our economy mean that it is a highly politicised issue. Throughout history, civilisations have risen and fallen on their ability to feed their populations. Today, it is estimated that 840 million people are severely undernourished, while in other countries obesity is reaching epidemic proportions. With world population continuing to grow, the politics of food are set to heat up considerably over the coming decades.

The world’s most important food crop is rice. It forms the staple diet of over 3 billion people around the world, and for many cultures: Rice is Life. Not only does rice play a central role in culture, but culture plays a central role in rice production. Over thousands of years, subsistence farmers have developed tens of thousands of different varieties of rice, painstakingly adapting them according to local environmental and cultural conditions. And it is this diversity that forms the basis of our food security.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) World Food Day this year reflects this intersection of cultural and agricultural diversity through it’s theme: Agriculture and intercultural dialogue - celebrating the contribution of different cultures to world agriculture.

However, many of the thousands of rice varieties that existed even 50 years ago have disappeared, replaced by the monoculture farming practices of the green revolution. And the sustainability and diversity of rice farming is now facing a new threat in the form of genetic engineering (GE).

The two varieties of GE rice that are proposed for commercial release are Bt rice and BB rice. Bt rice is genetically engineered to express a pesticide known as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), while BB rice is resistant to Bacterial Blight. Both carry the environmental risks inherent in GE technology, while significant health concerns have been raised over Bt rice in particular.

China has been widely touted to be the first cab off the rank to give GE rice the green light, however, a recent shift in the State Agricultural Genetically Modified Crop Biosafety Committee indicates that China is taking a more cautious approach to approving GE crop commercialization. The structure of the new committee reduces the influence of GE crop researchers and makes it more likely that decisions about commercializing GE crops will be based on ecological and food safety. The Chinese government is well aware that should it approve GE rice, it will be entering unknown territory and would be the first country to allow genetic engineering of it’s staple food crop.

GE rice is being promoted on the basis of something that bears little or no relation to the actual characteristics of the GE varieties that are being so aggressively pushed for commercial release. The need to solve world hunger and overcome starvation is used as a crude form of moral blackmail to encourage acceptance of products that are largely un-needed and unwanted.

Overcoming hunger and feeding people is very obviously a function of both producing food, and then distributing it to the people in need so that they have access to the food. In the real world, people don’t starve because there isn’t enough food produced, but because they are poor and are denied access to it. As a striking example, in 2001, the Indian government was sued after allowing grain to rot in government granaries while innumerable starvation deaths were reported throughout the country. Many countries in Europe pay their farmers not to grow food. While in other countries, produce is routinely destroyed due to market failures. Meanwhile, millions starve.

On the production side, there is scant evidence to support the claim that GE crops will increase production in anycase. The opposite is probably closer to the truth. The experience of the world’s most widely grown GE crop, shows that despite claims of increased yield, roundup ready soy yields around 5% less than conventional soy. The varieties of GE rice that are being developed are not supported by credible claims of increased yield either.

Rather than addressing the actual causes of malnutrition and hunger, too much of our research funding is being spent inventing more far-fetched, high-tech solutions to reinforce and extend a food system that is fundamentally designed to make profits for agribusiness rather than to feed people.

On World Food Day 2005, the absurd myth that genetically engineered rice has got anything at all to do with feeding the world should be buried at last in the dustbin of history.