“Beef is like a loaded gun, pointed at the living world.” So began George Monbiot’s response to the publication of the IPCC’s report on land use, which cited dietary change alongside 28 other interventions that could end the roughly one third of total greenhouse gas emissions that come from the food system. Read more
This article is by Kirk Hamilton, Cameron Hepburn, Alexander Teytelboym, Frank Sperling and Francois Cohen, the authors of Wealth of Nature, published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, in partnership with Green Economy Coalition.
George Monbiot doesn’t have a reputation for pulling his punches, and his recent Guardian column is a case in point. In it, he takes aim at the idea of ‘natural capital’: the idea that, by better understanding the economic value of nature, we might better protect it. Condemning such attempts as “morally wrong, intellectually vacuous, and most of all counter-productive”, George argues that economic approaches to natural protection can only lead to one thing: the wholesale destruction of nature for profit.
This post is by Miles King, senior ecologist at Footprint Ecology, and a regular blogger about nature and the environment.
If we could create a modern equivalent of the primeval landscapes that covered Britain before modern humans started to mould the country to their own ends; would it be worth doing, how would we do it, and where? Read more
If there has been a silver lining to the large cloud currently sitting over UK environmental policy it has been that environmental thinkers have gone back to check their assumptions and think anew about what really matters. Read more
Inside track 