Eco News June 2024 - Sort this Ruddy Weather Out!
“If anyone can sort this ruddy weather out, they’d definitely get my vote!’ I woke to hear these closing words on Farming Today two days after the General Election was called. Spoken by a farmer with passion and exasperation, they struck a deep chord with me.
Having sailed across every ocean of the world, helming through vast cloud formations and powerful storms, I know that the fate of humanity lies in our oceans. They drive our all our weather events: the incessant rainfall of our endless Spring, the floods, the hurricanes and even the droughts. Every drop of rain falling on our heads has evaporated from an overheated ocean.
You might also have heard the farmer in Lincolnshire in despair that his farm had been under water since Autumn. He had lost his winter crop and was not able to plant his summer crop either. Worse still, the absence of air in the soil meant that all the countless billions of aerobic micro-organisms in his soil had died, leaving it putrifying.
Do you remember Rambling Sid Rumpo on ‘Round the Horne’ in the sixties repeatedly saying: “The answer lies in the soil!”? He was so right!
Unfortunately you don’t hear our politicians talking about our soil or our oceans, or acknowledging with humility that our future is utterly bound up with them.
Some of you will have noticed with horror the steep rise in the price of olive oil. Drought has wrecked olive harvests in Spain and Italy and will continue to wreck others. As a species we inherited a beautifully balanced, productive planet, but we will now have to pay the price in steeply rising food prices until our oceans are allowed to cool.
At every step, however, political action is blocked by massive vested interests. There is no restraint built into the capitalist system that evolved in the 18th century. Maximising profits for shareholders is the sole fiduciary duty of company directors. They have no duty to our ecosystems or to humanity.
Within that model, political parties vie with each other about who can be trusted to generate the most growth. But their sort of growth simply doesn’t fit on one planet. We urgently need ‘One Planet Economics’! An economic system that will actually fit on our only planetary home.
Whichever government is elected, that will be their challenge. But first they will need to be open and honest about the problem.
It is no secret that I am standing for election as this magazine gets published. I am doing so with absolutely no hope of winning. For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I am doing the little I can to ameliorate the future they, and all of us, face. To be honest, I do so in deep despair because I can see no sign whatsoever that anyone is ‘going to sort this ruddy weather out’!
Edward Gildea, Eco Team Leader