David Levy – The Search for solutions – Jan 23

It’s the morning after the football match which once again we lost.   How many years has it been that we have had to witness failure by our National Football Team?   I remember the 1966 World Cup and the meeting of Pele and Bobby Moore.   Further on the Hand of God followed by the magnificent solo effort of Maradonna, both sides of a character and skill from the same man.   Since then endless penalty shoot-outs and always this blind loyalty by the supporters that cry out Eng-er-land and fail to know the words of the National Anthem.

Rant over.

What prompted this thought was my assessment of the environmental picture, and the same failings by the bureaucracies tasked with delivering solutions.

The patient is smothered from head to foot with plasters but these plasters no longer do the job.   The Environment is haemorrhaging its life force, and the Ministries have conspired to delude us that this is not the case.

Take the decision to factory-manage our meat and fisheries food supply.   It is a complex matter which has not been thought through.   Because of this, problems have arisen.

DEFRA advises farmers to spread the manure from factory-farmed poultry, pigs and cows onto the land.   The consequence of this advice is that river systems have been polluted to dangerous levels.

Add into that situation the constant discharges into rivers of untreated and partially treated effluent into from our sewage works and the problem defies belief.

Yet all it takes is for serious people to get round the table and to realise that sewage is a valuable resource which could provide energy and fertilizers for sale.   It takes investment of course, ingenuity and people who can think in the round to provide end of the line solutions.

Likewise the Fishing Industry — this is largely run by international companies who ‘own’ the fishing quotas and who export most of their catch — actually the nation’s fish stocks — to Europe and abroad.

As the benefits go abroad, our fish stocks continue to shrink to dangerously low levels.   In other words, no thought to the long-term growth of our fish stocks.   All the while the captains of these vessels work within the legal parameters to catch as much as is humanly possible.   It’s human nature.   But it all cries out for better planned management.

Those coastal communities around the country who operate the small fishing vessels — the ‘under 10 metre’ fleet — are allocated less than 5% of the quota whilst the stocks they fish are not protected from foreign boats, often vastly bigger than themselves.   The under-10 boats give good value for each individual fish caught, and support a small but important network of communities around the country.

I say ‘small’ but in fact the MPs who represent them could provide an important voting block in Parliament if only they would network together.   There is no evidence they are doing this, and the small boat fishermen are so brow-beaten that their resignation is like that of the average football supporter.   They just get on with it, without a vision of what things could be like and so improve their lot.

Nothing will change until this traditional industry decides that it is not a pawn in an international game of power broking, and that it must fight this current malaise by organising its political representatives.

On a personal level I realised this year that I need to take control of my own health, and I have made several changes to promote better health.

I no longer promote meat as a confirmed carnivore, but select farms and quality thereby avoiding mass produced factory-farmed chicken or pork.

For your understanding, I learnt 80% of all antibiotics manufactured go into the farming of livestock.   That makes the likelihood of anti-biotic resistance in animals and mankind much more probable, and thereafter the cause in a breakdown in human health.

This year I will search, along with Stephen, the ways and means of working for solutions.   The opportunities are scarce.   This is because the people involved in environmental matters are more focused on blame than working together on workable solutions.

This must change as regulators have been stripped of their budgets and no longer provide the service of safety people require.   As a result they no longer live up to their briefs, and certainly not up to their names, e.g. The Environment Agency.

The NGO Movement must have a section of their being which is devolved from their Charitable Status.   Where are the volunteers who work for the love of it?   These people must have support from their HQ, but operate without charitable money.   Only then will there be people who can say what is needed and find that they can genuinely work for solutions.

David Levy