Here's an email sent this weekend to Ed Miliband, the lead UK minister for climate change, taking issue with his view that it is "outrageous" to suggest that what little remains wild in Britain should remain so.
[15 December: Ed's email stating this (to which this is a response) is now appended]
Ed in general has been doing an outstanding job on climate change. Most impressive and more or less unique is
Ed's Pledge, his on-line campaign to build the critical mass of support needed to get the right result from COP 15 in Copenhagen.
However he has somehow not yet fully grasped the biodiversity arguments. Instead he has managed to come to the conclusion that what little remains wild in the uk should be sacrificed to windfarms and the like to meet consumers' insatiable demand for cheap energy.
Anyway, read on for the arguments.
Numbers make an enormous difference to such things. So should anyone happen to be moved to support, just paste a copy into an email with the heading:
re: Sign My Letter to David Cameron
add your comments and send it to "Ed Miliband"
info@email-new.labour.org.uk
(well that's the one he gives out, anyway. Given that address, might be an idea add to that you want him to receive it in person.)
In closing, should add that this is not a foray into politics. Just an exercise in rationality, attempting to reason objectively with those so engaged.
Dear Ed
Congratulations on Ed's Pledge and the tremendous work you are doing, especially in respect of COP 15.
Sorry to have to come back to you on this at a supremely busy time, but there is a fundamental flaw in the thinking here, and one that could prove fatal.
Ken Clarke was right on this. It is not a question of nimbyism, bourgeois values, or sentimentality.
It is the indisputable fact that wild places and undisturbed ecologies are absolutely essential for our survival. Simple as that. Because they provide the ecological services on which we all depend for our existence.
The various environmental crises which confront us so forcibly are simply the result of having failed to respect that immutable fact. The underlying reason for our current plight is that we have commandeered massively more than our sustainable share of the wilderness to serve our perceived (and often highly questionable) needs.
James Lovelock calculates that sustainability requires leaving no less than 90% of Earth in its natural state, entirely uninterfered with by human activity. Instead, the entire UK has been so modified and subordinated to human desires that there remains no wilderness to speak of, very little in the way of wild places, and the vast majority of the land mass is altered massively and detrimentally to serve human demands.
The solution to climate change is not to still further compromise or destroy those last remnants for the purpose of meeting demands that are grossly inflated by our refusal to accept our ecological limits. That is the critical mistake in your thinking.
In reality that is to add one of the final nails to our coffin by further undermining ecological integrity and the planetary life support system as a whole - which can already be seen on many measures to be approaching collapse. All in the perceived furtherance of living standards which are the root cause of the problem in the first place. Thus terminates our viability.
Its is as flawed a logic as to conceive the solution to be cutting down what remains of the Amazon rainforests to provide fuel to meet our energy requirements. Or to put up wind farms, for that matter. It would the same process. The only difference is that the UK is more advanced in the delivery than the Amazon nations.
If one of the richest countries in the world is not prepared to relent from subjugating all of nature to economic ends it renders bankrupt your negotiating position towards the developing countries - especially in respect of REDD, and indeed in the maintenance of ecological integrity generally. You can hardly expect the developing nations with their real and pressing needs to accept what you consider to be 'outrageous' when merely suggested for the UK. And if we do not have ecological integrity we have nothing, for on that everything depends.
Yet the importance of REDD must already be clear to you. Similarly the critical role of biodiversity. The Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity has already stressed that biodiversity is part of the solution to climate change; that healthy terrestrial and marine ecosystems are essential to the health of the atmosphere; and at COP 15 he has submitted a further expert report driving home that critical message.
Vital, then, that you appreciate wilderness is absolutely essential, and not a luxury to be traded away. To solve climate change and our other ecological crises we urgently need more, not less. And every nation has an inescapable duty in that respect.
To this end, please recognise the pivotal importance of large scale ecological restoration, as exemplified astonishingly by the Chinese on the Loess Plateau - an area the size of Belgium - and the groundbreaking work of John Liu at Rothansted.
And please understand that the world will no longer accept the implied imperialism in expecting the developing nations to deliver the ecological services which the UK considers completely dispensable on its own turf, and is prepared to undermine absolutely in the furtherance of preserving its standard of living.
So it is critical that you re-evaluate and take this on board urgently, even as you are in the process of negotiating the Copenhagen Treaty. It is absolutely vital that it is understood. By you. By Gordon Brown. By the other world leaders. And by everyone else involved in the negotiations.
The answer to climate change is not to complete the historical process of subjugating all of nature to meet human desires to provide more and yet more again. That is the endgame in our current and historical trajectory, and it ends - inevitably - in our self-destruction.
It is have the wisdom and humility to learn how to live well and happily within our ecological limits. Which is what we are now called on to do. That must mean valuing, protecting and restoring natural ecosystems over our more frivolous and debatable needs - even our indulgent, inflated demand for cheap energy on a massive scale - as well as getting back to real values.
We have no choice in this. You can negotiate all you like with each other, and for as long as you wish. But there can be no negotiating with Nature. And we can but accept her timing, or be swept away.
Canute showed that a long time ago. Please do not make the same mistake. Have the vision to re-evaluate now and rise to a pivotal role in changing perceptions - and in pulling us out of the fire.
That's Ed's Pledge. Thank you for it, profoundly.
Wishing you the absolute best for the rest of the summit.
PS
The importance of wilderness is far more eloquently argued by The John Muir Trust, the leading British actor in this field, which has been promoting the re-establishment of wilderness in the UK for over 20 years, and putting it into practice on its own lands and by assisting others similarly moved. Becoming fluent with their thinking would add new dimensions to your understanding and vision both domestically and internationally, and is most highly commended.
Ed's emails
Email 1
On 21 Oct 2009, at 15:06, Ed Miliband wrote:
If you can't see this email correctly, please
click here
Last week it was a backbencher, today it's one of the most important shadow cabinet members undermining the fight against climate change.
Last week I told you about a backbench Tory who said those of us concerned by climate change were part of a 'lunatic consenus'. Over a thousand of you wrote to your local newspapers, letters were printed in newspapers across the country and we made it clear that the public have had enough of climate change deniers. To all of you who wrote, thank you.
But today I'm writing to you again with worse news. Ken Clarke - one of the most important and best known Tories - has gone on record today opposing wind farms, saying: "My view is that those few wild and open (land) spaces that we have left in Britain should not be used for wind turbines."
I've decided to write personally to David Cameron, asking him to overrule Ken Clarke and make their policy clear. I'm going to deliver the letter tomorrow morning but need your support if it's to have impact.
Click to co-sign my letter to David Cameron
Ken Clarke's comments are outrageous and have an immediate effect of putting off investors and stopping the creation of green jobs in our renewables industry.
If one thousand of you sign this letter with me TODAY it will have much more media impact and show Ken Clarke that the British public want their politicians to take climate change seriously.
Click to co-sign my letter to David Cameron
Let's send another clear message that those undermining the fight to combat climate change will be challenged every step of the way.
Ed
PS – Once you’ve signed the letter please forward this email to your friends and ask them to sign as well – the more of us there are, the stronger we are.
To unsubscribe, please click
here.
Privacy: we won't pass on your email address to anyone else. See
http://www.labour.org.uk/privacy
Reproduced from an email sent by the Labour Party, promoted by Ray Collins, General Secretary, the Labour Party, on behalf of the Labour Party, all at 39 Victoria Street, London, SW1H 0HA
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Email 2
Begin forwarded message:
From: Ed Miliband
Date: 22 October 2009 13:30:38 BST
Subject: Success
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Thank you and well done.
After a huge effort by people who've signed up to the Ed's Pledge campaign, the Guardian has reported that Ken Clarke has retracted his comments calling for an end to the building of windfarms on land.
Yesterday was an incredible victory for everyone who’s signed up to the campaign.
Help recruit more people to this campaign - to fight for more victories like this
We set a target of getting 1000 signatures for my letter to David Cameron - you broke it within an hour. We set another target of 2000 signatures - you broke that too. Right now over 3000 of you have signed with more still coming in.
Winning arguments like this makes a differ ence. Climate change is too important to be left to be dealt with by people who resist the low carbon technologies of the future.
You showed that the power to make a difference lies with thousands of people working together.
Help recruit more people to this campaign - to fight for more victories like this
The more people we get involved in our campaign, the stronger each of our individual voices become.
So I'm asking you, with 46 days to go until the make-or-break Copenhagen summit, to bring more people into this campaign.
Today’s victory shows that, together, we really can make change happen.
Click here to tell your friends about Ed' s Pledge and the victories we can achieve together
Thanks
Ed
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