Meeting Shockat Adam MP about the Climate Plan

As part of our work on the Big Climate Plan campaign, we met Shockat Adam, the independent MP for Leicester South, to ask him to demonstrate his commitment to fair climate action. 

We explained that the government's new climate plan must set out how we will meet the UK's international commitment to cut carbon emissions by over two thirds by 2030. We're currently dangerously off track so we need to take urgent action. The plan therefore needs to be ambitious but we think it also needs to make sure that everyone can have lower energy bills, warm homes, clean air, better public transport and well paid green jobs. 

Many of the people hit hardest by the impacts of climate change, in the UK and worldwide, are those who have done the least to cause the problem. Fair climate action can bring benefits for everyone, not only those who can afford to buy a Tesla. With the backlash against net-zero in some quarters, it's vital that the government's plan is fair and seen to be fair. If it isn't, it risks being weaponised by climate sceptics and those seeking to delay climate action.

This week, Friends of the Earth published a new fairness focussed research report, highlighting the impact of climate policies on ordinary people. We gave Shockat a copy of the report and the petition that we had collected showing local support for fair climate action: 160 postcards and 227 digital signatures. We also presented him with the brainstorm of ideas for climate action, which people have been contributing to at our recent stalls. 

We discussed how fair climate action could make a difference locally, in improving cold and mouldy homes, reducing air pollution that affects the most deprived parts of Leicester most severely and in improving everyone's access to public transport. Shockat has agreed to present our petition to the Prime Minister and also to write to him to express his support for fair climate action. We were gratified to hear that he is very interested in these issues. 

Now all we can do is to wait and see what the new climate plan will bring! As this effectively marked the end of our work on this campaign, we went to the Phoenix for dinner to celebrate. Local groups across the UK are talking to their MPs about the need for fair climate action; we hope that together we will make a difference.

Calling for a Big Climate Plan on High Street

With one week to go until we meet one of our local MPs to talk about the Big Climate Plan, we had another stall to collect people's ideas for climate action and postcards to pass on to the prime minister. This time we were in the centre of Leicester, part way up High Street.

Street campaigning can be a challenge because people can be reluctant to stop and talk (especially if they think you're asking for money) and explaining campaigns very quickly is not always easy. We collected fewer postcards than the week before, perhaps because the weather was a lot colder. We noticed that people are feeling very disillusioned with the current government and are therefore unwilling to engage in anything 'political'. But we kept ourselves entertained with a friendly rivalry as to who was collecting the most signatures! Bruce beat everyone else hands down - we think it must have been his bobble hat. People gave us some odd excuses for not stopping to talk - the strangest being "I'm already married"! We're not sure what they thought we were asking!

Calling for a Big Climate Plan on Queens Road

We spent a couple of hours on Queens Road today, talking to passers-by about the Big Climate Plan campaign. National Friends of the Earth took the government to court last year for having an inadequate climate plan. They won the case and the government is now re-writing their plan, which they have to publish by 2nd May. Alongside Friends of the Earth groups across the country, we are calling on them to develop a new climate plan that is bolder and fairer. Millions of people in the UK are already suffering the impacts of extreme weather, sky high energy bills and rising inequality Our communities deserve warmer homes, cheaper energy, cleaner air, better public transport and well-paid green jobs.

Eight members of Leicester Friends of the Earth spoke to people on Queens Road, asking them to sign a postcard to the Prime Minister and collecting their ideas of what climate action we would like to see. It was a beautiful, sunny spring day and many people stopped to talk and share their ideas. If you were one of them, thank you! If you haven't had chance to sign a postcard, you can sign our digital petition instead. We're hoping to deliver the postcards and the petition to local MPs later this month, for them to pass on to the Prime Minister on our behalf. 

Celebrating the Highfields Centre's new project

We were very excited to be invited to celebrate the Highfields Centre being awarded a large grant, which will enable them to install solar panels and create a rooftop garden! The garden will be used and maintained by people from the local community, as well as being available to hire for events. We've already started planning to have a Friends of the Earth party there!

Leicester South MP, Shockat Adam, also attended the event and we were happy to have chance to speak to him about the Big Climate Plan campaign. It was great to hear that he is passionate about climate action and will speak up in parliament about the need for climate action.

Vigil for Palestine

Today we joined some local peace campaigners in a vigil for Palestine by Leicester's Clock Tower. Melanie Wakley spoke on behalf of Leicester Friends of the Earth. Here is what she said:

"Leicester Friends of the Earth comes to this vigil in solidarity with Palestine Friends of the Earth, also known as PENGON. PENGON is made up of 14 grassroots organisations working in both the West Bank and Gaza, and is the foremost environmental NGO network in Palestine. They have suffered terribly since the start of the war and continue to. Five PENGON members have been killed in Israeli airstrikes. 

The most recent escalations in violence are happening amid a decades’ long occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. For years, our colleagues in PENGON have shared with us the huge challenges of living under occupation. They now find their work hugely hindered, including in the West Bank, but they carry on despite the challenges. We stood with them before the war and we stand with them now. 

Friends of the Earth is the largest grassroots environmental justice network in the world. We know that to respond to the environmental crises we face, we must act on a global stage. We do this through our international network. That network’s strength depends upon its bonds of solidarity. Environmental justice means standing against injustice where we see it. The war on Gaza, and the Occupation, are towering, historic injustices. As an environmental justice network, we stand against oppression wherever we see it. 

We also want to grieve the environmental impacts of the war and the occupation. As much as 50% of Gaza’s agricultural and farmland has been damaged and 70% of its trees destroyed. 100,000 cubic meters of sewage and wastewater are daily dumped into land and sea. Between October and June 2024, more than 2,000 agricultural sites — including farms and greenhouses — were demolished in Gaza. There is reportedly 37 million tons of rubble in Gaza, increasing the risk of exposure to harmful substances like asbestos and pollutants released from facilities containing hazardous materials. The scale of destruction is simply staggering. 

Damage to the environment may seem secondary to the loss of life, but it is entwined with the humanitarian crisis. The people of Palestine live in their environment. Harm to water and sanitation, access to food, land pollution, the destruction of environmental projects, all affect the current and future liveability of Gaza. The Latest PENGON research from October 2024 has identified:

● 63 unregulated landfills with 1.2 million tons of solid waste causing an imminent public health disaster with transfer of diseases  

● Hepatitis, vomiting, yellow fever, trachoma, malaria, cholera, have all emerged, more than 50% of children are infected with Hepatitis A

● A 68% decline in Gazan crop yields 

● 93% of the groundwater wells are inoperable – ‘there is no clean water in Gaza and the luckiest people can access 3 litres of drinking water a day’. Water for other purposes has decreased from 80 to less than 20 litres

The UK could be doing so much more to bring peace. Our government provides crucial diplomatic support to Israel and continues to supply arms. This is despite an appallingly high number of civilian casualties and the vast destruction of Gaza, as well as accusations of violations of international humanitarian and human rights law, war crimes and genocide. The UK is at risk of complicity in the accused crimes and could make a significant difference. We are calling for a full arms embargo. We must stop arming Israel."

Cruise ships

 

Cruising volumes are going up rapidly but it comes at a large environmental cost, a fact that cruising companies are keen to greenwash.

This article from the Which makes interesting and worrying reading, but how often do you hear about this level of pollution in the press?  The article has an error in the table in the section marked “The carbon footprint of cruise holidays vs flying” but the general concept is obvious: cruising is the worst way of having a foreign holiday.

This isn’t just about CO2 either.  The heavy fuel oil that ships burn isn’t the same as the diesel fuel we put in our cars.  The article makes clear it has 100 times as much sulphur as the diesel we normally know.  The last time we took a cross-channel ferry the smoke coming out of the funnel was purple!

Cruise ship operators will talk about scrubbing the sulphur out of their exhausts using sea water, but that’s just transferring the sulphur from the air to the sea, along with other pollutants, a practice that is increasingly banned in ports.  It’s slightly ironic that people living near a port may think they’re getting fresh sea air when in reality they are probably suffering worse air and water pollution than people living inland. When added to the sewage in our rivers and seas you wonder what sea swimmers are actually swimming in...

When it comes to the impact on places cruise ships visit there is another problem, one that places like Barcelona and Venice are already grappling with.  The sudden arrival of thousands of tourists in a short period.  On a recent holiday to Orkney we are were given a listing of cruise ships, how many passengers they are capable of carrying and when they were to arrive and depart.  The reason?  When a 3,500-passenger cruise ship arrives at Orkney a fleet of buses appears to clog up the roads and any place of interest you want to visit is swamped with people – it’s best to hunker down somewhere.  These cruise ships are giving all tourists a bad name.

So, are you considering going on a cruise?  Do you know somebody who is going on a cruise?  Have you made them aware of the environmental damage they are doing? Have cruise ship passengers heard about the climate emergency?

Taking our pesticides concerns to City Council scrutiny committee

We've been struggling to talk to councillors and officers about our concerns around the use of pesticides in parks, so we have submitted a statement to the Culture and Neighbourhoods Scrutiny Commission and we will be attending their meeting next week, on Monday 4th November at 5:30 pm at City Hall. Here's our statement in full:

"Leicester Friends of the Earth have been discussing the council's use of chemical pesticides in the parks with officers and councillors for the past three years. After trialling a different product last year, the council returned to using glyphosate in parks this year, albeit at a lower concentration than previously used. The council's target for pesticide use in the Biodiversity Action Plan is to reduce it by 50% by 2030. We think that target is disappointingly unambitious when other local authorities have already moved away from chemical pesticides altogether. The Pesticide Action Network provide detailed information for local authorities on how to go pesticide free on their website. 

The areas that are sprayed in the parks do seem to have been reduced in the last couple of years - we can no longer see any sign of spraying around tree bases in parks, for example, which is an improvement. (Tree bases on road verges are still being sprayed, sadly.) But we are still seeing signs of spraying around and within children's play areas, which is concerning when it is known that children are more vulnerable to the effects of chemical pesticides than adults. I notice this in my local park in Evington, which makes me nervous about taking my nephew there. Like all toddlers, he likes to play with the soil and I spend a lot of time carrying him away from the sprayed, dead grass around the edges of the patches of woodchip and under the fence. Many people will not recognise what this dead grass means, so they will not be able to protect their children from being exposed to the pesticide residues there. 

We are concerned about the use of any chemical pesticides, and glyphosate in particular, for a number of reasons. There have been several studies linking glyphosate to cancers in people, particularly non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The research was collated in a meta-analysis published in the academic journal Mutation Research in 2019. Children are particularly vulnerable to the effects of pesticides, because their skin absorbs chemicals more easily and because they are more likely to be playing on the ground. The evidence for the ill-effects of glyphosate on bees and other wildlife has also been mounting over the last few years. It is now known that glyphosate harms bees’ digestive systems, for example, affecting their ability to absorb food, and also damages the ability of wild bees to regulate the temperature of their colonies. When insect populations are falling so alarmingly, we do not believe we should be doing anything to make the situation worse. 

Leicester has long claimed to be the UK's first environment city, but on this issue, it is clear that we are not taking the lead. In fact, we are falling far behind other towns and cities."

After we've read the statement, the members of the committee will discuss and we might be given the opportunity to ask a follow-up question, depending on the chair. We are preparing for this and will make sure we have some research to share at our fingertips.

If you're free next Monday, we'd love to have more people observing this meeting. Councillors will notice if people care enough about the issue to come to the meeting. You'll only be able to watch and listen, but just being there will make a difference. This item is first on the agenda and we can leave afterwards, so you'd probably only need to stay for 30 minutes. Please come if you can! We'll meet outside City Hall on Charles Street at 5:15 pm and go in together. 

Book Review - ‘The New Wild: Why invasive species will be nature’s salvation’ by Fred Pearce

This is a challenging and eye-opening book that demands an open mind of the reader, especially the reader who is steeped in decades of conservation theory and accepted wisdom about how to deal with alien species.

Starting from the premise that “Everything is visiting. Nothing is native”, Pearce shows us multiple examples of questionable alien species eradication policies, whether based on biased research, focused on small areas with the most damaging aliens, or founded on statistics wrongly quoted and requoted in many different settings. The result in many cases has been interventions carried out with almost religious fervour, even when the foundations for them are shaky.

Another Pearce motto is: “Conservationists favour the weak and vulnerable; nature favours the strong and wily.” The author explains how alien species can in fact strengthen native ones, and how species-rich areas are more robust.

At the heart of the arguments put forward in the book is the belief that the idea of ideal ecosystems, with every niche taken, is a myth. Pearce says that species are not co-evolved to fit niches and that the idea that they are is central to an ecological belief system that has similarities to religious beliefs in a Garden of Eden.

Indeed, this book questions whether the very concept of ecosystems is valid. As an artificial framing of nature, the ecosystem approach ignores the possible usefulness of aliens in colonising disrupted and novel environments such as logged-over forests or abandoned farmland.

Pearce identifies many negative unintended consequences of a blinkered approach to nature’s newcomers. He regards the very term ‘Alien invasive species’ as “a catch-all for nastiness and a recipe for muddled thinking”, as it conflates alienness with invasiveness. It also encourages indifference to nature away from where we expect to find it. He introduces uncomfortable parallels between a belief in the need to eradicate alien plant and animal species and hostility to foreigners in human communities.

Several ideas that emerge in the book run counter to received ecological thinking: that most greenfield protected sites are not biodiverse, due to pesticides and plough damage, and that there is considerable value in brownfield sites that is being ignored.

The bottom line: nature is not as frail as conservationists think. Nature doesn’t care about distinctions between urban and rural or alien and native – and novelty, rather than stability, is the norm in nature. The idea that we can save threatened species and return Earth to how it ‘used to be’ is doomed to failure.

The conclusion is that there are no perfect ecosystems, nor is there compelling evidence for the theory that there is a “global stock of species” that must be maintained. In contrast to these widely held ideas about ecosystems, Pearce insists that disruption is essential to evolution. This is an unexpectedly uplifting thought as it opens up new possibilities for how we can work together for the best outcomes for all of nature. 

by Michele Witthaus

At our meeting to discuss 'The New Wild', Michele also read us the poem below, which she'd written during the Covid-19 lockdown. She kindly agreed that it could be shared here!

Ecosystems Management for Beginners

The muntjac are grazing too close to the road
but keep quiet or they’ll be culled.
They have no inherent right to life
as they’re invasive, you see.

Opinion’s divided on foxes in towns,
snapped posing on garden paths;
some would prefer them hunted down
because they’re invasive, you see.

Grey squirrels are at the feeder again,
displacing your wild feathered friends.
But before you chase them, ask yourself:
Are they as invasive as we?

Eco Church Conversation

We were invited to attend an Eco Church Conversation event at Holy Trinity Churcy in Leicester to talk to people about how their churches might like to get involved in local activism. The Eco Church awards programme covers five areas:

• Worship and Teaching
• Buildings
• Land
• Community and global engagement
• Lifestyle

Other areas were represented by Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire, the Wildlife Trusts, local university projects, Leicestershire Swift Project and many other organisations! It was a very interesting day of conversation and new connections.

Book Review - The Secret Network of Nature by Peter Wohlleben

This book shows how complicated eco-systems can be – with some of the links being quite surprising. For example, the link between salmon and trees. On the north-west coast of North America, where the soil is low in nutrients, growth rings on trees show that there is a direct correlation between the number of fish that made their way upstream but were caught by mink, foxes, birds of prey, and carried off into the forest, nibbled and then left leaving the bones, rich in nitrogen in the forest. Data shows that Sitka spruce in these areas grow up to three times faster with the fish fertiliser. In some trees, more than 80 per cent of the nitrogen they contain can be traced back to fish. The conclusion of this fact is that if we disturb the fish runs by building dams or changing the water courses we also disturb the growth of the trees. He discusses animals, plants rivers, rocks and weather systems and how these delicate systems interact with each other to keep the balance working as a whole.

Wohlleben says nature is more complicated than the finely calibrated movement of a clock and if we carelessly remove one little cog – it can trigger a reaction that upsets the whole balance of nature. He further adds that sometimes helping a species also changes the balance as well. He concludes that we interfere all the time and we should just leave things alone – on as large a scale as possible and let nature sort itself out.

This book is written by a German writer and is a bit technical/scientific in places. Wohlleben says he began giving lectures and let his family listen to the recordings but they told him he was boring. He realised he used too many technical terms so he says he has revised his work and stopped doing that in his writing. He says he writes a better story now – read the book and decide yourself!