Justice for generations to come

People used to say the future would take care of itself. Now we know better. We have recklessly plundered the planet’s resources and in the process, spent our children’s inheritance. Now, says ecologist Fred Edwards, in conversation with Roz Paterson, it’s time we paid it back - or there won’t be time
The environment isn’t an issue. It’s the context. Issues are politics and economics; these can all be changed, but the environment is non-negotiable.”
So says Fred Edwards, the former head of Social Work for Strathclyde Region who trained as an ecologist at the age of 70 and is now the president of Scottish Environment Link, the umbrella organisation for 39 environmental bodies in Scotland.
He is passionate in his bid to instill in people a sense of crisis with regard to climate change, and  is terrified by governments’ ability to sideline global warming just as we approach the potential tipping point into irreversible catastrophe.
If that sounds over the top, then take a moment to reflect.
On the series of hurricanes, including Katrina, that swirled madly across the Gulf of Mexico last year, signalling that the earth’s mechanisms, designed to stabilise the global climate, were in overdrive.
On the Greenland ice sheet, now melting so fast that scientists can hardly believe what they’re seeing.
On the Kiribati islanders, preparing to abandon their drowning archipelago.
On this year’s summer that went on, and on, and on.
On our depleted global fish stocks, our vanishing wildlife, our thin soil and contaminated water, eroding coastline and failing Gulf Stream.
“Climate change is the biggest threat facing us. Already, there are 1 billion people who don’t have enough fresh water.
“In Portugal and Greece, they’re already looking at the onset of desertification. It’s not something that might happen - it’s happening now.”
And taking the JM Keynes attitude, that in the long run, we’re all dead -  meaning that the future can take care of itself - is not an option anymore. Because if we do, then in the long run, we’re all dead.
Fred was born and bred in Liverpool, from whence he embarked on a naval career followed, some years later, by a career as a probation officer in his home city.
“I found that very fulfilling indeed. I had a great deal of autonomy in my role, which was to advise, assist and befriend, and that meant I was also accountable with regards to each individual I was ‘caring for’.
“I was enormously proud of being part of a society that set resources aside to advise, assist and befriend offenders.
“It wasn’t just altruistic, it made perfect economic sense.
“Because if you can ‘salvage someone’ early, everyone is a winner.”
This work was to lead him, ultimately, to Scotland, where he took up a post in the social work department in Moray, Nairn, then Grampian, and finally Strathclyde, working alongside a number of people who inspired him with their “very real principles of social justice...(and their recognition of ) the value of every human life.”
And it was this that led him, upon retirement, to pick up his lifelong passion for the natural world and translate it into voluntary work in the environmental sector.
“Because I was convinced, in the 21st century, that the biggest threat to justice and peace in human society was to be found at the interface of development and environment.
“The resources of the world are being exploited on a vast scale, by the so-called developed world, and it is the developing nations, or the south if that’s a better term, who are paying for it.
“If everyone lived as we do in Scotland today, we’d need three planets to furnish what we’re doing. It is manifestly unjust and in the long run, everyone will pay. Though as yet, the powerful people can buy their way out, while the powerless suffer.”
Fred graduated through the Open University as an ecologist at the age of 72.
He wasn’t looking for a new career, just a means of “enhancing” his understanding.
He is heartened by the number of young ecologists he had met since, pushing the case for sustainability, but is a little appalled that, to the general public, the environment has been allowed to become a “middle-class pre-occupation”, concerned with recycling bins and farmers’ markets, that politicians all too often regard as “not absolutely relevant to the nitty-gritty...but it’s going to be the source of some of the greatest injustice.”
In fact, he says, it always has been.
“Think of the prevailing South Westerly winds we have here. Everyone with money used to live in the West end, and the poor lived in the south east, alongside the dumps and the ab attoirs.
“Now this is happening on a much bigger scale.”
As well as global justice, Fred talks of “intergenerational justice”.
He recalls looking down at the river that ran through Port Sunlight, near the Mersey, and noting its “deadness”
“People didn’t think about it in those days.
“Dumping everything in the water to externalise costs was just something you did.
“But now we have the knowledge to enable us to appreciate that what we do now will have an enormous impact on our children and grandchildren.”
They will witness the rising sea levels, the millions displaced, the consequences in terms of world agriculture, food supply and water.
“We have squandered our resources, and the ecosystems on which we depend are unravelling.
“We are polluting the sinks, the sinks being the earth, soil, seas, rivers. We’ve already lost a third of the world’s fish stocks.
“These are a renewable resource, but we’re screwing it up!
“Take fresh water which, through the wonderful way our earth works, is a renewable resource. But we’re screwing that up as well.
“We’re responsible for this!”
 It is neither right nor helpful that we leave it to future generations to pick up the pieces.
And though the Stern report, commissioned by thy UK government, has given a huge boost to the push for urgent action, its terms are economic, “which is wrong. To me, it’s like viewing it through the wrong end of the telescope.
“When people say they have to ‘balance’ the economy and the environment, they’re talking nonsense. We have to adjust the economy to save the planet, to ensure it’s capable of sustaining life.”
He is also “furious” with those who try to confuse man-made climate problems with the natural cycles of change that have impacted on humankind.
Those natural cycles exist, spanning thousands and millions of years, but they are not the key to the post-Industrial Revolution surge in greenhouse gases that have brought us to this impasse.
But it gets trotted out, usually cynically, to reassure voters that it is OK to vote for cheap petrol.
The problem that politicians have, he says rather generously, is that they feel bound to the short-term, to quick results, whereas the environment is a long-term project, with few tangible results for those seeking instant gratification.
“And this creates problems in a democracy and I’m not sure what the solutions are. What I am sure of is that none of them are simple, slogan solutions.”
He suggests enhancing the role of audit commissions, which can criticise the government and demand action, and establishing cross-party, but powerful,  environmental commissions.
“It’s head-hurting stuff. The sort of thing that makes you realise why Karl Marx spent so long in the British Library!”
Education is key, through schools, even churches.
“If you engage someone at school, then you also engage their parents, their parents’ friends - you tap into all kinds of networks.
“And if you can get an element that involves the empowerment of women, then you have a much greater chance of succeeding because you will draw in so many people: children, husbands, families.”
Experiences in Bangladesh and Cambodia, where women’s education programmes were run in tandem with clean water projects, showed both the influence within a community that women have and also that making something immediate, relevant, makes it something people want to learn about.
The challenge for us, in the inner cities in particular, is to make the connection between the micro-fauna that enrich our soil and the food that keeps us alive. Cultivating a garden in a primary school, such a simple thing, explains this “connectedness of things”, helping people understand “that everything plays a part in our lives.”
Remarkable things can happen, as in the South Bronx, where people, led by women, reclaimed their stretch of river and, in turn, reclaimed their sense of being human creatures and part of the earth’s cycle.
Other measures are called for, from capping carbon emissions to curbing the crude oil habit. But how?
Fred admits he’s not “entirely at one with my colleagues over the issue of using fiscal instruments (such as a green tax, for instance).
“Indirect taxes always bear more heavily on the less powerful, so I would prefer something like carbon rationing.
“I remember food rationing, and it was a very just system. With unforeseen dividends in health terms.
“My generation was the healthiest ever. And yes, there was a black market, and spivs selling stuff that fell off the back of a lorry, but it was infinitesimal compared to the overall impact of rationing.
“We could do the same with carbon. This is an even bigger emergency.”
Of course, to truly throw the brakes on climate change, this kind of initiative would have to be taken up internationally.
That doesn’t mean, however, that we in the UK should wait until everyone else does it first.
“It is incumbent on us to make sacrifices because we’ve been living on resources that we haven’t paid for; the colonial legacy, if you like.”
He points to the fact that increasing numbers of people feel we should view international debt in ecological terms.
“In which case, fortunes are reversed. We owe much more to Africa than they ‘owe’ to us.”
And it’s high time we paid them back.
Not to mention those we will pass the world onto in the future. www.scotlink.org

Pride o’ the Clyde

by Jo Harvie

The sky scraping cranes in the yards still cast shadows over Govan, once the shipbuilding hub on the Clyde. There’s now only one yard at work, and Govan is changing - housing flattened to make way for warehouses, and people shipped out or crammed into shrinking islands of tenements and flats, desolate, derelict land lapping at their doorsteps.
But in the midst of new, prefabricated ‘to let’ office spaces, the GalGael Trust’s big and bustling workshop smells of woodland and sawdust. It’s packed with mystical carvings and huge wooden ships. It’s like stepping into another time, another world. Except not really, because everything they do is about Govan, in the here and now.
“The Highland Clearances moved people off the land and brought them into the cities looking for work,” explains GalGael worker Tam McGarvey. “Now it’s happening again as the communities here are broken down.”
GalGael is all about re-establishing that sense of community, through connecting people with each other and with their environment.
The idea of GalGael germinated in the trees of Pollok Free State, the site of the protest against the M77 motorway extension through Pollok Park.
Taking part in the protest, people started filling in their time learning new skills, like wood carving.
When the protest came to an end, it seemed a shame to let that fall away, especially as the type of work they were doing - planting, working with natural materials - had real impact on people.
Colin MacLeod was one of the mainstays of the Free State, and a driving force in setting up GalGael from the ashes of the motorway protest. When I dropped in to the workshop for a look around, the GalGael folk had just marked the first anniversary of his death. This thriving heart of craft and learning is an incredible legacy to leave.
They started in Govan next to the river, “with a couple of chisels,” and an intention to build boats.
“Colin had a connection with the sea,” Tam tells me, “he just thought that was the way to go. He saw it as another alternative to protest, a way of taking positive action.”
People who weren’t working got involved, using their time to learn new skills, to make things with their hands, and enjoy the sense of satisfaction you get when you can stand back and look at something you’ve created.
Using reclaimed wood, the boats they built weren’t just for standing back and admiring. The folk that built them learned to sail them too, folk from Govan for the first time in a generation getting back out onto the Clyde, and from there discovering the West Coast of Scotland and beyond.
Now, as well as word of mouth, people are referred to GalGael by various agencies. They help people who’ve been unemployed long term get back into the way of working, but under their own steam. People with all kinds of problems find focus and recover confidence.
Older men with a host of skills have got involved too, sharing their experience with the younger men and women, rather than retiring to the armchair, daytime telly and the pub.
And now they offer an SQA qualification through Cardonald College.
The trust puts a heavy emphasis on cultural and natural heritage - but it’s not an exclusive heritage.
They take their name from Norse people who settled in Scotland and intermingled with the local population - GalGael means ‘strange Gaels’, and symbolises immigration and integration.
Tam argues that, “working with natural materials is an international language, like music.”
The intention is to expand the horizons of the people who get involved, not to narrow them. Tam calls it “enlarging their sense of territory.”
“We’re working with people who’ve never had a holiday, hardly been out of Govan, never mind Glasgow. We take them up the West Coast and they’re frightened of sheep!
“We’re getting them to connect to the land, to realise that they live somewhere beautiful, that they don’t have to stay in this wee ghetto.”
The ethos of GalGael challenges the isolation of poverty, and empowers people with a sense of community, which grows with awareness of the history of the materials they’re working with and the methods they use, and a connection with the land and the sea. Tam occasionally refers to them as a ‘clan’.
“It’s not all about history. We discover we can control our own future by sticking together, helping each other out.”
And as well as this deep, rich vision of what working as a part of nature can do for people and society, there’s simple environmental logic too. They take scrap and turn it into useful, beautiful things.
“Wood is the most sustainable resource, as long as you mange it properly and replace what you use.”
Their next project is to build a longhouse on a stretch of land next to the river, with a slipway to launch the boats built inside. It will face square on to the vast wall of ‘executive housing and retail units’ on the north bank of the Clyde, Glasgow City Council’s ‘regeneration’ Glasgow Harbour Project.
The longhouse couldn’t be more different. Research that Colin did found communities right across the North Atlantic used longhouses as community bases, a place to come together, discuss and make community decisions. After a blitz of cuts that’s seen community facilities almost wiped out, Govan’s longhouse couldn’t be more needed.
“We’re getting a foothold there, for community access,” says Tam. “We need to get people out onto the water, learning about nature and history.”
That’s one way, he says, to learn to treat each other, and therefore nature, with respect. “When we realise that we’re all part of nature, we realise that if we damage nature we’re damaging ourselves.”

n For more information on Galgael see: www.galgael.org
 They can also be contacted on 0141 427 3070 or email: mail@galgael.org