Hurrah 
I think there has been an enormous amount of ‘unpleasant’ chemicals being sloshed around, mainly due to complete ignorance of users, and at the root of it all is the rather disappointing approval of nasty chemicals being able to be produced in the first place. Control/eradicate the production and the ignorant users can’t fail!
Like it or not, there are many nasty chemicals that have helped to vastly expand food production in the last 150 years. Without those chemicals, the Earth would almost certainly not be able to support the current population.
Now, if they had never been produced in the first place, world population would be much lower, the biosphere would almost certainly be in better shape, and life would be very different for most people. That’s the solution that would have been preferable, but unfortunately, we are where we are and the genie is out of the bottle.
Some of the practices with said chems leaves a lot to be desired though. From Scotish and Asian fish farms (I only know about those two) but world wide there will be many others to dairy and poultry farms etc where 80% of the anitibiotics and other chems are wasted on to the land and water courses allowing bacteria to evolve and become resistant will form part of this legacy.
This is the story told by the agribusiness lobby Hairbear - in fact more objective studies (including those by the United Nations) clearly indicate that the most productive form of agriculture is small-scale organic farming.
Not only is chemical farming destroying the environment, it is completely counter-productive - with one exception: the short-term profits of huge multinational farming corporations.
I’d “like” this 100 times if I could!
And also biodiverse farming instead of these huge monoculture fields that take huge heavy machines which damage the soil structure. Nature in the wild NEVER looks like this.
I barely have time to weed and once the clay hardens I can’t weed. My borders have a myriad different weeds jostling for space between my roses. Nature, left to its own devices is totally abundant.
The damage doesnt appear on the companies balance sheet but it is on the planets!
Yep - this is what economists call ‘externalities’. The UN has also calculated their real cost - and the conclusion was that no multinational corporation would break even - let alone alone make any profit - if it paid its true costs.
Monbiot on the UK government:
Even when the cost to the government is small, it seems determined to destroy everything good and valuable about this country. It’s as if, when ministers go to bed, they ask themselves, “What have I done to make the UK a worse place today?”
When I began work as an environmental journalist in 1985, I knew I would struggle against people with a financial interest in destructive practices. But I never imagined that we would one day confront what appears to be an ideological commitment to destroying life on Earth.
It’s a deliberate plan to render the Earth uninhabitable for humans, but very pleasant for the Zionist Lizard People that live on Mars and rule the Earth through a puppet Shadow Government.
Am I doing this Conspiracy Theory thing correctly?
I think you’ve characterised the barmy conspiracy theorists on the extreme right pretty well, NotALot - but unfortunately this is merely a distraction from a real, evidenced conspiracy by wealthy interest groups against democracy…
As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has documented, hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money (funds whose sources are unknown) were poured into the nomination and confirmation of the three judges appointed to the court by Donald Trump. Among the groups leading these campaigns was Americans for Prosperity, set up by the Koch brothers: oil tycoons with a long record of funding rightwing causes. As an investigation by Earth Uprising shows, there’s a strong correlation between the amount of oil and gas money US senators have received, and their approval of Trump’s supreme court justice nominations.
Is that flat too?
Another apposite Monbiot quote on this day the UK government is disintegrating…
Almost everything of importance is disintegrating fast: ecosystems, the health system, standards in public life, equality, human rights, terms of employment. It’s happening while elections come and go, representatives speak solemnly in parliament or Congress, earnest letters are written and polite petitions presented. None of this is enough to save us from planetary and democratic collapse. Business as usual is a threat to life on Earth. Disrupting it is the greatest civic duty of all.
I found this absolutely fascinating… of particular interest to @DrMarkH perhaps in its comparison of tourism with ‘art in an age of mechanical reproduction’…
(Caveat - its in French and combines ecological and marxist conceptualisations, so it’s not an easy read.)
This is a nice bit of tiny scale positively 
This is my Niece doing something similar.
This is something I have to remind myself of often.
In one of my last big professional jobs I worked with a dozen or so young entrepreneurs in Morocco (getting mentored by me was one of the things they won in a competition for new young entrepreneurs - luckily they also got cash, etc!). Most of them were setting up great new green businesses - organic growing, eco-tourism, making paving slabs from waste, natural toiletries, etc, etc. Truly inspirational.
Ecological and marxist conceptualisations sounds too much to read in any language.
So pleased I am a simple soul drifting through life enjoying whatever comes my way.
Thanks Geoff, an interesting, thought provoking article.
About fifteen years ago I wrote that ‘environmental tourism is in oxymoron’, but my fading brain can’t remember if the context was the English Lake District, or the so-called rewilding of S Africana gricultural land to create luxury game reserves. However, my emphasis was primarily on tourism’s visual impact on the physical landscape rather than its more subtle and complex economic aspects.
I largely agree with the account but also thought one would have to be an unusually brave European researcher to publish such an article in a post-colonial academic context, where one would be viewed as arguing against the dominant orthodoxy of ecomomically empowering historically disavantaged communities.
Incidentally, as you probably spotted, the author seemed to invertwhat Walter Benjamin argued in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, namely that the replacement of the traditional auratic, unique work of art by by new media, such as photography and cinema, was a postive democratic development. There’s some flaws in Benjamin’s argument, but it highlights the problematic oppositon between preservation (of exclusivity?) and democratisation.
It is pretty hard to thread your way through this complexity. There are, obviously, strong arguments for and against eco-tourism. It can, for example, create income streams that enable poor people and regions avoid over-exploiting land and other resources - I’ve worked on projects like this in the past that have actually preserved habitats threatened because people have to get a livelihood somehow - but at the same time, the tourists providing the income streams are likely to get there by air…
But interesting I thought that the article digs even deeper than these issues, drawing on the ‘Frankfurt’ conceptualisation of late capitalism’s commodification of all aspects of our lives, to critique the very basis of all tourist experience, as running counter to any real ‘ecological’ relationship of visitors to landscape, nature, etc - raising the question of what non-commodified travel might look like outside ‘the tourist industry’ - and incidentally just how close ecology is to marxism.