This thread tells a shocking but common story about upland vandalism.
It begins with this blatant misinformation on a display board erected at public expense by @NidderdaleAONB. It claims that burning the land combats climate change and protects wildlife. The opposite is true.
2. I wonder whether this reflects the influence of the landed interests on its advisory committee: such as the Moorland Association. In any case, it looks to me as if it's using public money to promote private interests.
Oh, and take a look at its logo: a red grouse.
3. This is quite common: display boards in "protected" areas often claim that trashed wastelands are magnificent wildlife havens, and their disastrous management is the best way to treat them. We need honest communication about the state of the living world. #Tellthetruth
4. Abutting the grouse moor is Guisecliff Wood. It's a rich and beautiful ecosystem, much of which appears to have regenerated in the past century or so.
The only thing stopping the trees from returning to the moor is burning by the grouse shooters. This is the edge of the most recent burn. You can see scorched saplings in the foreground, and living ones beyond, spilling from the edge of the wood.
The burning creates the grouse shooters' ideal landscape: MAMBA. Miles And Miles of Bugger All.
7. The grouse shooters burn the land to produce the young heather leaves grouse like to eat, creating a kind of gigantic upland chicken farm. They claim to be "burning heather". But in reality they burn everything that can't get away fast enough.
Photo by @Lukesteele4
8. We've been taught to fetishise monocultures of heather or rough grass in the uplands. But they're typical of landscapes worldwide that have been repeatedly burnt, cut or grazed. Upland woods are much rarer habitats in the UK, and much richer in nationally important species.
The name of this ecological desert, by the way?
You couldn't make it up.
10. Unfortunately, it's entirely typical. As @RewildingB showed yesterday, grouse shooting moors also blight vast tracts of our national parks. theguardian.com/environment/20…
11. They are one of the reasons why there are more trees/hectare in some London boroughs than in some of our national parks.
It's a disgraceful state of affairs. bbc.co.uk/news/science-e…
1. This is a thread about a new form of political organising, which proved spectacularly successful in this election, and that other constituencies would do well to adopt. It’s a means of navigating our unfair, unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system. 🧵
2. It’s the People’s Primary model developed by some very smart folk in my own constituency, South Devon. They set up the @SDevonPrimary. This article explains how it works. theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
@SDevonPrimary 3. There was a great deal of hostility, from the Conservatives, Labour and even the LibDems (the ultimate beneficiaries). Why? Because the model enables voters to take back control of the electoral process from political parties. They hate that.
#IDthought 6: At every general election, we are faced with a binary choice. With one cross, we are deemed to have signalled our agreement everything in a party’s manifesto and everything else – if it wins – it can ram through Parliament over the next five years. 🧵
It’s not that different from the cross or thumbprint with which indigenous people were asked to sign treaties with European colonists, which in some cases they were unable to read. It arises from the same mode and style of governance.
There is no means of refining our choice, of accepting some items and rejecting others. With one decision, we are presumed to have consented to thousands of further decisions. We do not accept the principle of presumed consent in sex. Why should we accept it in politics?
#IDthought 5: Until the neoliberal era, inequality declined for some 60 years. From the 1980s onwards, it returned with a vengeance. Since 1989, America’s super-rich have grown about $21 trillion richer. The poorest 50 per cent, by contrast, have become $900 billion poorer.🧵
Why? Because trade unions were crushed. Because tax rates for the very rich were slashed. Because any regulation that big business viewed as constricting was loosened or eliminated. And, perhaps most importantly, because *rents* were allowed to soar.
I don’t just mean housing rents. I mean all *access fees* to essential services that have been captured by private wealth: water, energy, health, railways etc. And the interest payments arising from the financialisation of higher education.
#IDthought 1: Throughout the media we see an unremitting, visceral defence of capitalism, but seldom an attempt to define it, or to explain how it might differ from other economic systems. We propose a definition that seeks to distinguish it from other forms of economic activity
I did produce a neater definition, which has the virtue of parsimony, but the disadvantage of being incomprehensible to almost everyone.
"Capitalism is an economic system that both creates and destroys its own n-dimensional hypervolume."
1. This week’s column is about something we badly want to believe, regardless of the evidence: that livestock farms are benign and harmonious. Why? Mostly, I think, because it chimes with books and cartoons we see as very young children. Also: a threadtheguardian.com/commentisfree/…
2. It discusses a film enjoying unexpected success in UK cinemas: Six Inches of Soil. In many ways, it’s a good film. But it tells us a story we want to hear, and in some respects is misleading and wrong. sixinchesofsoil.org
3. This is especially the case with the carbon calculations for the cattle farm it features: first we see a temporary, cyclical gain reported as making the farm carbon negative. Then entirely hypothetical figures treated as if they are real. Both cases are serious misinformation
1. There’s a telling sequence in the Netflix docuseries Raël. A completely mad cult claims, without a jot of evidence, to have cloned a human. And the world’s media fall for it, hook, line and sinker. All it took to fool them was 2 people in white coats and some lab equipment.🧵
2. What do we learn from this?
A. That the media is as susceptible to evident BS as the members of the crazy cult.
B. That it has a massive diversity problem – and not just the one(s) you are probably thinking of.
3. In any major newsroom, just about the only people with science degrees are specialist reporters. Almost without exception, the senior staff and main decision-makers have non-science degrees. Their knowledge of basic science is approximately zero.