4/4 Are Killing my Country by RobertMacFarlane

Last year, I was approached by OneLife, the "lifestyle" magazine of Land Rover, which is sent out to Land Rover owners in more than 60 countries and is, according to its own modest marketing, "worthy of the world's best coffee tables".

OneLife had a writing commission in mind for me. I would be flown out to the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean for a three-day stay. There, I would conduct a "beach-based" interview with "the world-famous freediver Tanya Streeter": the conceit being that I, as a mountaineer, and Streeter as a diver, were both explorers of the vertical. I would stay in the best hotel on the islands. Naturally, all expenses would be covered and all transport pre-arranged. The fee for the subsequent 2,000-word article would run to a generous five-figure sum.

If only it had not been Land Rover making the offer.

How ardently I wished for it not to have been Land Rover.

Transport is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide production in Britain: transport emissions increased by 50% between 1990 and 2002.

In the main, this is due to the unsustainable growth in air travel.

It is also, however, down to the massively burgeoning 4x4 market. Sales of 4x4s grew by 12.8% in this country last year, to 179,000 vehicles: more than double the number sold 10 years ago. Only 12% of 4x4s are ever driven "off-road", 40% never leave the city.

One cost of the 4x4 boom is long-term environmental.

Big 4x4s in urban conditions manage 13 miles to the gallon; the very biggest manage four. Four miles to the gallon. To drive a 4x4, given the disastrous rapidity of climate change, is to demonstrate the same reverse-denial of the lung-cancer victim who continues to smoke cigarettes after diagnosis.

My OneLife contact sent me two issues of the magazine.

It was lavishly produced, and "landscape" was its glamour, its sales pitch. On every page, Land Rovers romped across winter hillsides, over desert dunes, along boulder-cobbled river-beds.

There were glossy centrefold spreads of eco-porn: thrusting mountains, brothel-pink sunsets. cracked mud patterns served as wallpaper between text boxes. Nature was being used to sell a product which embodies the principles by which nature must not be understood.

OneLife - what a happy holistic world the name evokes! - is of course only conforming to large-scale 4x4 advertising strategies. You will be familiar with them from television commercials: gleaming semi-militarised vehicles ploughing through a swamp, or along a cliff-top, before slewing to a rakish halt at a view-point. The vehicles' names - the "Touareg", the "Bedouin" - are repellently shameless steals from aboriginal cultures, designed to raise atavistic hairs on the backs of consumers' necks.

4x4 advertising is dedicated to manipulating landscapes into generic forms. All that it requires of a landscape is that it evoke the idea of challenge - something resistant to be conquered, something natural to be tamed. A river is valued for its difficulty of fording. A mountain for its dramatic and nameless escarpments. No landscape can be only itself: it must represent an obstacle of some sort.

The hypocrisies of 4x4 marketing are dark, multiple and pernicious. Everything about the product urges us to the wrong relationship with our environment. They expound a vision of an unspoiled and untroubled land, even as they market the tools of its further wreckage.

The massive sales growth of the 4x4 is one dismaying example among many of the gap which currently exists between knowledge and place.

Each month, it seems, that gap widens. Apocryphal stories circulate: about the schoolchildren who do not know that milk comes from cows, or who cannot identify a cucumber from a line-up of vegetables. In April of this year, the Woodland Trust published research showing that 94% of British children are unable to identify common native trees - beech, ash, birch, hazel - from their leaves, and that more than 40% of seven to 10-year-olds have never visited a wood.

Gentle Gorillas, Turbulent Times

By George B. Schaller

(Originally published in the October 1995 issue of National Geographic)

On January 22, 1991, my wife, Kay, and I sat on the summit of Mount Visoke, one of the eight Virunga volcanoes that straddle the borders of Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda. We had come to help with a mountain gorilla film. That morning we had left the Karisoke Research Center, the base of Dian Fossey's gorilla work from 1967 until she was killed by unknown assailants in 1985. Her hut of green corrugated metal remained, littered with remnants of her past. Still on the wall was a plastic Santa Claus, a poignant reminder that she died at Christmastime. Beside her cabin, shaded by moss-laden boughs of hagenia trees, was her grave, along with those of 17 gorillas, one dog, and one monkey.

But it was not a day for us to dwell on tragedy. Instead of the swirling gray fog and rain-drenched slopes that are so common here, the volcanoes rose stark and clear above a shimmering forest. To the west, in the saddle between Mikeno and Karisimbi, the two highest volcanoes, was a place called Kabara. Kay and I had lived there in 1959 and 1960 while conducting the first intensive gorilla study. Now, after three decades, we had returned to an idyll of our past.

The gorillas on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes—some 300 animals—inhabit a small forested island surrounded by a sea of people. Twenty miles to the north is Uganda's Impenetrable Forest, now protected as Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, another island with perhaps 300 gorillas. These 285 square miles represent the entire world of the remaining mountain gorillas. Years ago, when I watched the gorillas' leisurely life, the animals eating and sleeping and tumbling in play, I was glad that they could not fathom their rarity and my concerns. We have a common past, but only humans have been given the mental power to worry about their fate.

Now the radiance of those months returned as intense memories. Once again Kay and I followed a swath of head-high vegetation until soft grumbles signaled contented gorillas ahead. We recalled old gorilla acquaintances: Big Daddy, the silverback leader of a large group, his power majestic even in repose, and Junior, a reckless young male that liked to linger near us. Once a female with an infant on her back had climbed with startling innocence upon a low branch to sit with me, probably the first time that a wild gorilla and a human were amicably side-by-side.

However, to me that gorilla study had meaning beyond the gathering of new facts. Gorillas had long been viewed as symbols of savagery, "exceedingly ferocious" in temper, as a 19th-century missionary phrased it. My task was not to capture or master them but solely to interpret their life. So I approached them with empathy and respect, wanting nothing from them but peace and proximity. And they accepted my presence with an astounding generosity of spirit. The recent decades have been a turning point, indeed a revolution, in our relationship with animals. Humans have begun to overcome cross-species barriers, achieving intimacy with humpback whales, chimpanzees, lions, mountain sheep, wolves. The gorillas of popular image were a fantasy. It pleases me that I helped change perceptions.

The gorilla, of course, is more than an animal. These apes are a primal part of human heritage. Our kin. We traveled down different evolutionary paths, the gorillas creating their own world, complete and coherent, and humans shaping theirs. No one who looks into a gorilla's eyes—intelligent, gentle, vulnerable—can remain unchanged, for the gap between ape and human vanishes; we know that the gorilla still lives within us. Do gorillas also recognize this ancient connection?

Our reveries that day on Mount Visoke were shattered by a walkie-talkie message from the lowlands: The Rwandan Patriotic Front—led by ethnic Tutsi—had invaded from Uganda. We were ordered to leave the mountains immediately. Led by primatologist Diane Doran, the director of Karisoke at the time, we descended to the town of Ruhengeri. Caught in the middle of a battle between rebels and the Rwandan Army the following day, we were evacuated by French paratroopers.

Ironically, Kay and I also had to terminate our project in 1960 because of war. The Belgian Congo, now Zaire, gained independence that year, and with it came years of unrest. And in Rwanda, a Belgian protectorate until 1962, the Hutu tribe waged a civil war against the ruling Tutsi. Many Tutsi fled the country, living in exile until they invaded their former homeland in 1990. The renewed war climaxed in the carnage of April 1994; soon after, the Rwandan Patriotic Front achieved victory and formed a new government.

The mountain gorillas have a long past but only a century of history, much of it turbulent. This history began in 1902 when a German officer, Capt. Oscar von Beringe, first encountered the apes—and shot two. In the next quarter century, collectors and hunters captured or killed more than 50 gorillas in the Virunga region. Carl Akeley of the American Museum of Natural History shot five gorillas in 1921, but he was so impressed with the apes that he prompted the Belgian government to establish Africa's first national park, Albert National Park, for them in 1925.

Belgian protection gave the gorillas relative peace until the turmoil in 1960, when the Belgian park staff fled. Civil war, insurrection, and the division of Albert Park into Zairean and Rwandan sectors demoralized the guard force. Cattle invaded the fragile uplands, and poachers roamed the forests. Their wire snares cut deep into the gorillas' flesh, but some managed to tear free. In one group of 11 gorillas two animals had only one hand each; another's hand was deformed. Gorilla hands and heads were sold as souvenirs to tourists. And the gorillas lost much forest. In 1958 the Belgians in Rwanda turned over 27 square miles of gorilla habitat to farmers, and in 1968 another 38 square miles, or 40 percent of the remaining forest, was given to a European-sponsored agricultural scheme. It was a desolate time, to which the gorillas could be only mute and passive witnesses.

Gorilla numbers plummeted. In 1960 I estimated about 450 in the Virunga region. Censuses during the 1970s showed around 275, and by 1981 there were only 250. During this critical time Dian Fossey, assisted for varying periods by Craig Sholley, David Watts, Kelly Stewart, Ian Redmond, Alexander Harcourt, and others, was at Karisoke. Dian harassed poachers with obsessive zeal. And she made the world aware of the gorilla's plight. Her heroic vigil helped the apes endure. However, her unyielding confrontational approach with local people, one that she termed "expedient action," ultimately cannot save wildlife. Conservation depends on the goodwill of the local population.

A new era in gorilla conservation began in 1978 when Amy Vedder and Bill Weber of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York arrived to establish gorilla tourism and an education program for the Rwandans. The following year their work was incorporated into the Mountain Gorilla Project, financed by an international consortium of conservation organizations. This integrated program of antipoaching, tourism, and education, all in cooperation with a receptive Rwandan government, had a marked impact on local attitudes.

A well-trained guard force maintained the national park. The education program created widespread awareness not just of the gorillas but also of the need to protect forests. The Virungas in Rwanda represent less than half of one percent of the country's land area but 10 percent of its water catchment. Without the forests to store water, streams would disappear during the dry season and deprive the dense human population of water. Four gorilla groups were soon habituated to tourists' viewing them at close range. Fees for tourists were high, yet so enthralled were visitors that gorilla viewing became at one time Rwanda's third largest earner of foreign exchange. Similar programs were later initiated on the Zaire and Uganda sides of the volcanoes.

The Mountain Gorilla Project also had an unforeseen impact. The people of Rwanda became proud of their apes. The gorillas became part of Rwanda's identity in the world, a part of the nation's vision of itself.

The 1980s were a golden time for the 30 or so gorilla groups on the Virunga volcanoes, and the population grew again, to about 320. The innovative program initiated by Amy Vedder and Bill Weber had become a classic story of conservation success, one that has been emulated in its approach many times.

Then the most recent civil war violated the gorillas' peaceful existence once again. Yet in spite of the turmoil, with soldiers of both factions traversing the forests, the gorillas have not been decimated. Indeed the Rwandan Patriotic Front expressed public concern for the gorillas' safety even while it was fighting. The new prime minister, Faustin Twagiramungu, has affirmed his country's commitment to the apes. Given the urgent and crushing social needs of Rwanda, this declaration is remarkable. For one species to fight for the survival of another, even in times of stress, is something new in evolution. In this, more than all our technology, lies our claim to being human.

e4: economy, ecology, equity and ethics

providing a clear direction for discussion and action
a declaration by a group of leading economists and activists invited by
Schumacher College to take a systemic approach to the economic emergency


building the green new deal
The world is in the grip of a fourfold crunch - the crises of ecology, economy,
equity and ethics. We face these crises with concern and hope: concern for the
misery they are creating and hope that we have the courage to look deeply into
their causes and find lasting solutions.
Governments are putting new money into circulation and bailing out banks;
they are focused exclusively on reflation whatever the cost. At best, this amounts
to short-termism.
So what else can we do?
We need a new approach – to save the economy by investment in saving the
planet through measures that will benefit all of us (including the bankers).
Building on the idea of a green new deal, this document addresses three crucial
questions: What can we do now? What transformation must follow? What might
the future look like?

the policies we need now
First we need a green new deal with a clear focus on green investment.
Investments today determine the shape of the economy tomorrow, and so
must be adapted to future needs. To counter recession, tax relief can be used
to stimulate green demand. We propose the following actions:
- re-regulate the financial sector
- no more absurd credit creation mechanisms
*Limit the capacity of banks to generate unsustainable credit (for example by
ensuring a global framework that reinstates appropriate reserve-requirement
ratios and/or leverage ratios).
*Require transparency of financial instruments and ensure appropriate scale
of financial institutions (for example splitting up too-big-to-fail banks and
tougher auditing).
*Make sustainability and ethical criteria central to pension funds and to
independent credit and risk rating (for example by compulsory carbon
reporting).
- new green investments
- stimulate investments to save the planet
*Set up new, and extend existing credit institutions that drive green and local
investments (for example through lower interest rates).
*Advance green and fair procurement by increased use of the state’s
purchasing power to stimulate information, training and jobs for green
infrastructure, sustainable energy and biodiversity.
*Counter the restrictions on credit by providing safe and sustainable
investment opportunities with state guarantees for projects that have high
sustainability and ethical ratings.
*Provide incentives and investment for ecosystem services and biodiversity
(for example for farmers and for rural and marine regeneration).
*Encourage businesses to help one another through regional complementary
currencies providing liquidity in times when credit is scarce.
- fairer taxes and rising green taxes
- tax bads not goods
*Shift the tax-base from labour to resources.
*Introduce fairer taxes to reduce social inequality).
*Outlaw off-shore tax havens and tax corporate profits in the countries where
they are earned.

The more we increase green investment, the more we need to shrink investment
in unsustainable parts of the economy, or else we risk overshooting ecological
and social limits, and thus trigger new booms and busts. Therefore we need
new principles.

principles of transformation
Today’s economy has two major structural flaws: economics is designed singlemindedly to maximise financial returns and does not recognize ecological limits.
Thus, increasingly, financial capital is growing at the expense of other types of
capital. We need a vision that supports human rights and wellbeing and acknowledges that human beings are part of nature. This leads to an Economy
firmly rooted in Ecology.
The e4declaration recommends eight principles:
1 quality of life
The basic aim of the economy is to meet human needs equitably and to
improve quality of life. To achieve this, we need to measure economic
success by metrics of well-being.
2 ecological realities
The economy must be designed on the basis of ecological systems, with
environmental values playing a central role in reaching economic decisions,
and we must move as rapidly as possible towards a resource-light economy.
3 appropriate scale
Society should aim to develop more direct relationships between buyer and
seller and to meet local needs with local production. At the same time, local
initiatives need to be geared to global realities.
4 optimal diversity
Diverse social, cultural and economic systems are more resilient against sudden collapse. Diversity must be actively promoted, protected and treasured.
5 from ownership to stewardship
Society should support a diversity of business models that encourage individual and mutual ownership, and social entrepreneurship at a small scale, but encourage stewardship and shared ownership on the larger scale.
6 stable and dynamic
The optimum health of any complex system is at a balance point between
efficiency and dynamic resilience.
7 equity
Every single human being has basic rights that must be met by social and
economic systems. The current economic system manufactures poverty
and inequality. Also we must ensure intergenerational equity so that the
young are not compromised by the requirements of the old, and vice versa,
and the rights of future generations are protected.
8 beauty and elegance
Beauty and elegance lift the spirit and enhance human wellbeing.

Monetary systems can and should be redesigned to serve all of these principles
and not simply to maximize financial gains.

glimpses of the future
All aspects of human activity must function in accordance with the eight principles. This section focuses on four key areas to give a flavour of the
changes that can be made, and are already happening, to create a just and
sustainable economy.
food and agriculture
If the food supply chain was designed according to the principles of the four E´s
we could feed everybody to the highest standards of nutrition and gastronomy.
All we really need to do is to develop food and farming expressly to feed people
without wrecking the rest of the world – what has been called ‘Enlightened
Agriculture’. These are the basics:
*Husbandry should be largely traditional – but this does not imply a simple
reversion to the past. We need to build on the traditional crafts with excellent
science and to ease the physical burdens with truly appropriate technologies.
Science and high-tech at present are designed to replace traditional crafts.
In short, we need a ‘new agrarianism’.

*Investing in a truly sustainable organic food system where, as far as possible,
food is produced, prepared and consumed locally. Wealth created from the
food chain should remain within communities.

*Many initiatives are already in train to bring about the necessary
transformation and these must be supported. They include the slow and
organic food movements which foster food culture, and schemes to increase
access to land, such as community-supported agriculture, land trusts and
food co-operatives.

money
Money is a construct and the way it works can be changed. We can create money
systems that are stable and help the real economy to work within ecological
limits, rather than forcing us beyond those limits. We need to:
- Expand accounting to include social and environmental capitals.
- Encourage complementary currencies that promote social and environmental
value as well as supporting geographical areas or economic sectors at
different scales.
- Re-localise the finance system with strong support for community-based
institutions and investments.
- Support and develop the new models of money creation (for example TERRA
Global Reference Currency) and interest-free lending into large scale
experimentation, action research and evaluation. This will replace compound
interest with a more intelligent circulation mechanism
- Ensure finance systems are subordinated to the interests of the community
and of the ecosystem. Chiemgauer currency in Germany, JAK Bank in Sweden,
Wirtshaftsring in Switzerland, and time banks are examples that are already
making money work for people rather than the people working to pay the
costs of money.

governance
We can transform governance through a positive vision of what people want to
see in their local, national and international areas, giving people control of their
own lives. We need to:
- Adopt the principle of subsidiarity so that decisions and responsibility are
taken at the lowest possible level. Communities are already recognising this
need, for example in the Transition Initiatives starting around the world,
connected via a network able to spread benefits through knowledge sharing.

- Introduce a sliding scale of regulation so that the larger an organisation the
more heavily it is regulated.

- Strengthen the rights of stakeholders.

- Decouple governments from corporations.

- Ensure that transnational corporations are accountable and subject to
democratic oversight.

- Introduce maximum & minimum wages with a maximum ratio of difference
between most and least paid.

- Take responsibility for environmental refugees.

- Develop appropriate and effective international institutions for a just
economic and ecological order.

energy
Rapid technical advances and price reductions in large-scale renewables have the
potential to replace coal and nuclear ‘base-load’ generation. This necessary
investment should not overshadow the development of smart local solutions
which are an essential part of providing a resilient energy network. We need to:
- Start a global carbon cap and trade system, based on IPCC science, that internalises the environmental cost of carbon dioxide at source, ensuring that fossil fuels are fully costed.

- Rapidly deploy energy efficiency programmes (for example retrofitting existing housing and other buildings), providing mass employment
opportunities.

- Upgrade the electricity grid to allow contributions from remote large-scale
renewables (for example offshore wind and concentrated solar power).

- Encourage implementation of small scale local renewable, and high efficiency technologies.

- Adopt smart policy measures to support the above actions (for example government guaranteed feed-in tariffs, and roll-out of renewable obligations).

- Remove institutional barriers to sustainable energy (for example by rethinking unfriendly grid tariffs and policies, and re-designing smart local mini-grid systems, already successfully implemented in Woking, UK and many places in Germany).

With the eight principles at the heart of decision making, and by effecting change at all scales as this section begins to explore, we can shape the economy to have people at its centre while recognising our dependence on our planetary home and its diversity of life.

www.e4declaration.org
The e4 declaration is a work-in-progress, providing an important statement of direction for economic change. The continuing task of developing the policies and enabling the change is for us all to undertake. If you support this initiative and the continuing work, please share it widely and send it to the Prime Minister and to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Ask them to see the economic crisis as an opportunity for change and use it to create a sustainable and just economic order by adopting the principles and policies presented in this declaration.
Please show your support; join the e4 discussion at www.e4declaration.org.

The e4 declaration was issued by Schumacher College
Think Tank on Holistic Economics, November 2008
The Declaration is the collaborative work of the Think Tank participants.
All support the Declaration but not necessarily every detail, and it should not be assumed to be officially endorsed by their respective organisations.
The meeting was attended by:
Victor Anderson Sustainable Development Commission
Tom Andrews Soil Association
David Boyle New Economics Foundation associate and author
Tim Crabtree Centre for Local Food
Cherian Eapen ROY International Children’s Foundation
Brian Goodwin Schumacher College
Oliver Greenfield WWF One Planet
Colin Hines author, Finance for the Future
Nadia Johanisova author
Margrit Kennedy MonNetA
Miriam Kennet Green Economics Institute
Satish Kumar Schumacher College and Resurgence
Ann Pettifor Advocacy International
Julie Richardson Landscope
Wolfgang Sachs Wuppertal Institute
Sulak Sivaraksa Spirit in Education Movement
Per Espen Stoknes Norwegian School of Management
Colin Tudge author
Antony Turner CarbonSense
Stewart Wallis New Economics Foundation
Also in attendance:
Nick Hart–Williams Be the Change, film crew
Fraser Durham CarbonSense, film crew
James Martin-Jones facilitator.
Mark Burton Schumacher College, assistant facilitator