Now Frankfurt. Our organised civilisation cannot persist for much longer without immediate and dramatic global action to end the use of fossil fuels and to restore nature. The only remaining people who say otherwise are mad, moronic or corrupted by money. For a basic primer on the problem -

https://twitter.com/bengoldsmith/status/1691535443479707648

Britain is a rich, stable and developed country. We can so easily afford to feed, water and house ourselves without trashing nature, and the ‘natural capital’ on which we depend for *everything*. What kind of an example do we set for poorer, less secure nations if we can’t manage… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… – We must end the blanket use of pesticide chemicals in food production. Pesticides are simply annihilating the invertebrates on which the whole ecosystem depends. Modern farming techniques now allow for integrated and precision approaches which require vastly less of these toxic… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

Here’s a curlew (red-listed) desperately searching for its nest after the field has been mowed for silage.

Mowing fields in May is a relatively recent thing. Across much of Spain, it is prohibited, to protect nesting wildlife from being macerated.

Only fields which have been transformed from vibrant, diverse meadows, singing with crickets, into monocultures of that appalling blue-green rye grass which now dominates our landscapes, and heavily chemically fertilised, are worth cutting for silage in May. This one change has… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

British farming has overseen a catastrophic depletion of our soil, clean water, wildlife, and all of the nature on which we depend utterly. Some may kick and scream, but if we do not change course we will suffer food insecurity on a scale we have not yet seen./1

https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/1600177981028462592

Farming is regulated more lightly and subsidised more heavily than any other industry. By “red tape” @wheat_daddy means regulations which stand in the way of the worst excesses of modern farming, such as the dumping of slurry and other pollutants into the streams and rivers./2

The gov has splurged ~£400 bn trying to stop Covid, ~£150 bn subsidising energy bills, ~£25 bn on new core funding for the NHS 2019-23.

A measly set of proposed tax cuts (to a level still higher than they were under the last Labour gov) are not the cause of our economic woes. The same commentators who spent two years demanding longer, tougher lockdowns, which wrecked businesses, lives and the public finances, are now triumphantly telling anyone who’ll listen that Kwarteng’s minuscule planned tax cuts caused this economic mayhem. It’s beyond belief.

Reminder: The lockdowns and other useless, catastrophically expensive restrictions wrecked businesses, lives and the public finances. This is why we are now facing rampant inflation, rising interest rates and renewed government austerity.

Everything else is noise.

https://twitter.com/AdamBienkov/status/1581170740962861056

If, like Jeremy Hunt, you joined the overwhelming chorus for longer, stricter lockdowns and other useless, illiberal, terribly harmful restrictions – this is as much on you as on anyone else. The policies *you* demanded caused chaos and achieved nothing.

Nearly a week now since the mini budget unleashed a *sterling crisis* which, if you squint at it, looks somewhat similar to the media-invoked 2021 *fuel crisis*. This might become a little awkward for some. The 2-yr picture shows a different story - the pound losing a quarter of its value as the previous government gave in to media, opposition and public clamour to borrow and uselessly splurge hundreds of billions of pounds trying to stop an unstoppable respiratory virus.

The poor state of public finances and the £ are a direct result of having spent £ hundreds of billions in a vain effort to stop an unstoppable respiratory virus – a set of policies which, tragically, were endorsed across the political spectrum. The prices of gas and other essentials have been soaring worldwide because of Covid policies everywhere. Even this new splurge by our government on helping people with high energy bills pales into insignificance by comparison with the amount spent vainly fighting Covid.

Great to hear the new Defra SoS @ranil is keen to focus on UK food security. So presumably that means a crackdown on the use of vast tracts of our best farmland to grow biofuels and fodder for factory farmed livestock, and an effort to tackle our massive food waste problem. We must only hope that the encouragement of a return to traditional, less intensive, wilder farming approaches on streaks and patches of our least productive farmland, our degraded uplands and former wetlands, doesn’t come under friendly fire!

“In Ireland, anti-Jewish racism spreads within the corridors of power and unlike in the UK or US, appears to be as much driven from the top down as the reverse."

What’s with Ireland’s antisemitism problem? What have Jews ever done to Ireland? jpost.com/diaspora/antis… The Irish appear to hate the world’s only Jewish state, microscopic Israel thousands of miles away, with a virulence that is inexplicable in the context of historic events. Why? jpost.com/opinion/articl…

One of the most valuable things the ⁦@nationaltrust⁩ does is to encourage on its least productive land a return to more traditional, more extensive farming approaches and the recovery of vibrant nature. Members should be vocal in their support. theguardian.com/environment/20… Members should demonstrate the unpopularity of this absurd, destructive motion by voting against it.

When a fresh government of any kind is being formed, new ministers find themselves quickly encircled by powerful vested interests made up of people who consider nature and efforts to protect it merely obstacles to be steamrollered. I’ve seen it firsthand./1 An overwhelming majority of us today wish for an end to the wrecking of the natural world, for a realignment of incentives so that the work of restoration may begin, for an end to extreme animal cruelty, for serious action now to avert the breakdown of the climate./2

Some of the most satisfying and funny environmental wins are those that force self-described free-market conservatives to reach for Leftist levers of power to try to stop them. Trump’s use of subsidies and regulation to defend coal from ever cheaper wind and solar for example./1 Conservatives who stand opposed to ‘polluter pays’ regulation are not real conservatives. If society has to pick up the tab for sorting out the mess created by a private business, that is as much a subsidy as a cash handout, and not compatible with a free and fair market./2

Here are a bunch of easy ways to spot whether the natural environment where you live is in good or bad shape.

For starters, do the grassy areas around you, large or small, have plenty of flowers at this time of year? If they do, that’s a great sign. /1 At this time of year the grass should be alive and singing with all kinds of colourful, chirping crickets, grasshoppers and other bugs. If the grassy areas where you live are silent on a sunny July day then there’s a problem. /2

Our ability to feed ourselves is top of the news now, rightly, given current global events. But don’t be fooled into believing that creating more wildness in our landscapes conflicts with food production. Here’s how we increase food security while restoring nature. /1 We must get serious about eliminating the flagrant waste of 9.5 million tonnes of food in the UK each year, an amount worth more than £19 billion. /2 independent.co.uk/climate-change…

Coercing people into having a Covid vaccine they don’t want, and telling lies about why it’s *necessary* for society that they do, is a pretty good way of turning people against all vaccinations, including the ones we really do need everyone to have. bbc.co.uk/news/health-60… Vaccines, a miracle of science, rely on public trust. It is a terrible mistake that countries such as Australia, Canada, Austria are forcing even the young and healthy to have one they don’t need and which does little to prevent others catching COVID. bbc.co.uk/news/world-eur…

The government should go whole hog and end all remaining rules and restrictions now.

At this point nothing will satisfy the roughly half of the population that is fully overcome with irrationalism.

May as well please the rest, while being on the right side of history.

https://twitter.com/bengoldsmith/status/1477541412782682112

History will determine that the lockdowns and other restrictions were not only hopelessly ineffective, but deeply harmful to people’s lives and to society itself in all kinds of ways.

The UK can be among the first to call out the madness for the benefit of the rest of the world.

More and more people are anxious as awareness grows of the decline of nature in the world. Here’s what I think each of us can do towards turning things around. Chief among them is to expand our own personal relationship with the natural world./1 Find a wild place near you, no matter how small, and spend regular time there. Walk, sit quietly, notice the innumerable small interactions happening all around you, the patterns, the changes brought by the passing seasons. Time spent in nature makes you feel good./2

We are told relentlessly that we cannot have wilder landscapes, even though the UK ranks among the most nature impoverished nations in the world. Rewilding, they say, will hit food security while depleting rural employment. These arguments is entirely wrong. Here’s why: 🧵 UK food production is overwhelmingly centred in the lowlands of the east. The National Food Strategy estimates that turning the least productive 20% of our farmland towards nature recovery would lead to a less than 3% reduction in food (calories) produced in the UK. /2

“... every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell, 1984 bbc.com/news/entertain…

I spent a day looking for traces of Frankfurt’s fabled Jewish community. The Jews were amongst the first people here, and were at the heart of city life for ~eight centuries. You would hardly know it now. Just a few old broken gravestones and this achingly sad Holocaust memorial. Through the centuries Jews here were penalised, harassed, crammed into a tightly-packed and squalid ghetto from which they were not allowed to leave without permission, periodically massacred, but still they thrived, producing some of the great creators and achievers of Europe.