Peter's Blog

Visitors to this website will know the dry, analytic style with which I approach the Great Problems of the Day. It’s OK for fellow geeks and it certainly keeps the Trolls at bay. But how do we get the ideas more generally discussed? There has to be a story, some element of drama, strong feelings, tension, perhaps blood on the carpet.

This is why we put a cow on trial. She represented the global livestock industry, accused of serious crimes against the biosphere. Some people think livestock are responsible for a quarter of global warming, more than all the transport, not to mention other environmental effects on biodiversity, water supply and so on. Others vigorously dispute this, even arguing that correctly managed livestock can solve the climate problem all on their own. So, much to argue about.

The Trial took place at the Shambala Festival in Northamptonshire, in August. We rigged up a Crown Court inside a large marquee. There was a judge, real lawyers, nationally-respected expert witnesses, a jury, and in the dock, Daisy the Cow. Moo! On this occasion Daisy was a pantomime cow: a real cow required too much paperwork.

The trial took about two hours, and finally the Jury retired to consider its verdict, which was arrived at by secret ballot. Much to everybody’s surprise, Daisy was found Guilty, although the Judge was not severe; he sentenced her to community service. Moo! A report of the Trial can be found here.

Naturally Daisy’s lawyers have mounted an appeal, and if this is successful Daisy will reappear for a retrial at the same Festival in 2018, and perhaps in other places too. Watch this space.

Continuing the tradition started by The Trial of Daisy the Cow, my friend Stephen Peake and I presented a satirical sketch based on Dad’s Army, at the fourth conference of Sustainability in Higher Education, in Swansea, July 2019.

As outlined in a previous blog (The Great Paradox) I have been trying to challenge the ‘Education for Sustainability’ community to raise its game to engage with the newly-recognised physical Climate Emergency. Up to now this community has concerned itself almost exclusively with small behaviour-changes in the manner of the environmental movements of the 1970s.

So far my challenges have simply bounced off. I wrote a provocative paper ‘Peer-Reviewed Hippies’ for the second in this conference series, in 2016, but it was ignored. Hence this new effort to draw attention to the real problems of sustainability, and their extreme urgency.

The sketch is based on the idea of an ‘eco-Home Guard’ within the imaginary Ponzi University (rhymes with Swansea) tasked by the Vice Chancellor to come up with a zero-emissions plan. The running gag is that the grandiloquent Captain Mainwaring champions all manner of tiny incremental local measures, while boots-on-the-ground Sergeant Wilson is arguing for vast technical fixes on a national scale. There was a pointed contrast between ‘vegan gooseberry fool’ (that was actually handed round the audience) and the Swansea bay tidal lagoon that, had it been built, would have been visible from the conference venue.

The take-home message is that right now, tidal lagoons are needed, while the Sustainability in Higher Education community offers only fool, or what the journalist George Monbiot calls ‘micro-consumerist bollocks’.

The script, Eco-Emergency! is here.