All posts by Tony Gosling

Beginning his working life in the aviation industry and trained by the BBC, Tony Gosling is a British land rights activist, historian & investigative radio journalist. Over the last 20 years he has been exposing the secret power of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and élite Bilderberg Conferences where the dark forces of corporations, media, banks and royalty conspire to accumulate wealth and power through extortion and war. Tony has spent much of his life too advocating solutions which heal the wealth divide, such as free housing for all and a press which reflects the concerns of ordinary people rather than attempting to lead opinion, sensationalise or dumb-down. Tony tweets at @TonyGosling. Tune in to his Friday politics show at BCfm.

The Gatekeeper: George Monbiot’s Multi-Level Marketing of Ecomodernism… but where’s the evidence?

The environmental debate in Britain is maintained by a few unaccountable figures elevated to the role of eco-gate-keepers – which is why the ecological debate fails to make any real progress

 

Page bookmarks

(Use Hotkey & ‘number’ to jump to that section)

  1. MLM: ‘Through a glass, darkly’
  2. George Monbiot’s ‘accuracy problem’
  3. Ecomodernism’s ‘data problem’
  4. George’s fallacies on fermentation
  5. Conclusion: If ecomodernism’s tinkering has failed, it suggests that their model is wrong

 

We should be holding the political establishment’s feet to the wild-fire on ecological issues. Instead, a handful of ‘reformers’, promoting schemes or proposals which don’t radically up-end the ideological landscape, are given preferential access to the public debate; to peddle, ‘multi-level marketing-style’, demonstrably wrong ideas about how to solve the ecological crisis. How do we hold these media-constructed pundits, who claim to represent our interests, to account? It’s all about the evidence.

 

download the PDF version of ‘The Meta-Blog’ No.24: ‘George Monbiot’s Multi-Level Marketing of Ecomodernism’, 4th December 2022
download the PDF version of this post

This is a necessarily long and detailed dive into the role ‘green pundits’ have in the ecological debate – and whether that role is truly representative given the available evidence. To be clear, this isn’t just about George Monbiot specifically. By its nature, this also a discussion about the overwhelming class divide1 in the ‘English’ environmental movement2 (since it’s the London-centric English media and campaign groups which dominate this space).

As a Guardian columnist3, George Monbiot essentially states opinion, not facts. The problem is, in the public debate which then ensues from those opinions, his narrowly focussed articles are cited as if what is said were wholly true – when in fact the wider evidence base is being strategically ignored.

Monbiot is not alone: I could equally cite journalists such as David Shukman; ideological media constructs such as ‘Countryfile’4; pundits like Mark Lynas; or ‘green’ entrepreneurs such as Dale Vince. As these figures overwhelmingly embody the affluent middle class values5 of the establishment, that debate not only downplays the trends6 which are the result of that lifestyle; but also fails to connect to the people who stand to benefit7 the most from this debate – the ‘average’ person8 living within the increasingly precarious9 UK economy.

Instead, what passes for10 ‘radicalism’ in English environmentalism are groups like Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil. But these groups are not ‘radical’11: They are once again dominated by the middle class; their metropolitan focus alienates them12 from the rest of Britain; and they have no specific project other than that governments ‘tell the truth’13 and take action14 on climate change.

Therein, like the media’s green pundits, the groups considered to be ‘radicals’ in the public debate are ‘statist’15: Their unwillingness to look beyond the ideology, structures, and lifestyle created by Western affluence and consumption, cannot encompass – in terms of it’s original meaning of, ‘from the roots’16 – any truly radical solution to the ecological crisis.

MLM: ‘Through a glass, darkly’

That preface made, we come to the reason for this article: There are subtle changes in ‘green’ lobbying taking place, driven by changes in the media.

In the 1990s I was an elected director of Friends of the Earth at an auspicious moment17. ‘Green’ had gone mainstream18, and the pressure was on to drop any ‘hair shirted’ ideas19 for ecological change: Not only to ride that media machine to get coverage; but also to soak-up the cash sloshing around from government and corporate interests desperate to greenwash20 their image. I opposed the idea, and ‘green consumerism’21 in general; but the pressure from the staff of nearly all mainstream campaign groups was to ‘take the money’, because of the access and influence that it promised.

Three decades on and that approach has clearly failed22 – and arguably has diluted the movement’s influence23 within the ‘noise’ created around these issues. More recently, though, this process has shifted, reflecting the economic pressures on the ‘legacy media’24, driven by the new on-line/social influencer ‘multi-level marketing’25 (MLM) machine.

As green issues have matured against that ‘background noise’ of the ecological crisis; and as government inaction has shifted to the lackadaisical definition of targets, quotas, and especially subsidies; the pressures for environmentalists26 to promote certain issues has shifted from one of ‘making change’, to promoting ‘a business plan’27. In part the result of neoliberal values infiltrating all levels of society, ‘green’ ideas have ceased to be28 an advocacy for political action. Instead they advocate for one infrastructure plan or another which seeks to ‘green’ the modern lifestyle – without changing it.

This position was openly articulated by Jonathon Porritt29 – one of those most directly responsible for ejecting radical thinking from first the Green Party, then Friends of the Earth. In his 2005 book, ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’30, he states:

‘I Want To Believe (in wind power)’

“Incremental change is the name of the game, not transformation. And that, of course, means that the emerging solutions have to be made to work within the embrace of capitalism. Like it or not, capitalism is now the only economic game in town… For fear, perhaps, of arriving at a different conclusion, there is an unspoken (and largely untested) assumption that there need be no fundamental contradiction between sustainable development and capitalism.”

(my emphasis in bold)

As ‘regulation’, let alone ‘limits’ or ‘prohibition’ becomes a dirty word in the skewed-to-the-right media environment, so ecological issues are expected to perform within the processes of the corporate world. This is the environment which has spawned, ‘ecomodernism’31.

George Monbiot’s ‘accuracy problem’

The basis for most discussions about ‘future change’ today, is ‘stasis’: Proposals do not challenge ‘business as usual’32, which is why the ideas being publicly debated seek to preserve the core of the way things are. This is the contradictory paradigm within which George Monbiot33 is trapped.

I specifically use the word, ‘trapped’: If he moved out of that niche I’m sure he would lose that media profile. He is permitted to perform that role in the media environment precisely because of the values he advocates, not because of the veracity of the ideas he promotes. It is his own, personal cost-benefit exercise that he chooses to occupy that role – but that doesn’t mean it is evidentially correct.

‘Comforting Lies vs. Unpleasant Truths’

I first bumped into George Monbiot at events in Oxford, and on roads protests, in the early 1990s. We occasionally corresponded, but that ended when he gave support to nuclear power in the late 2000s. Or to be more precisely, I kept trying to advance the alternative case and he simply refused to respond – even when we met in public.

These days, when I publicly challenge his assumptions he never responds. He also blocks people on social media who query his work.

The difficulties with The Guardian – the largest remaining allegedly ‘politically liberal’ broadsheet within Britain’s right-biased media – have been growing for some time. Recent campaigns to ‘dump The Guardian’34, and high-profile resignations35, have called into question the quality of their reporting. Once again, this highlights both the intellectual boundaries within which George Monbiot operates, and the ‘conformity’ those pressures may apply to the subjects he covers.

His columns in The Guardian are sparsely sourced, and sometimes factually flawed. My last ‘public’ deconstruction36 of one of his columns was published in May 2020 – when he attacked the then recently released film, ‘Planet of the Humans’37.

At the time I published a short blog post, which had been extracted from a twenty page complaint (with forty references, mostly to academic journals and official data sources) which I wrote to The Guardian’s ‘Reader’s Editor’38. I never received an acknowledgement… despite sending it twice!

Critical of Michael Moore, the structural flaw in that article was the fallacy of ‘affirming the consequent’39: It suggested that as right-wing climate deniers liked Michael Moore’s new film; then the position that Moore depicted must be friendly to climate denial too. In reality, many ‘anti-greens’ didn’t like40 the film’s message. The reason they talked-up the film was precisely because its message made liberal environmentalists feel uncomfortable.

The article attacked the film’s assertion that photovoltaic (PV) panels produce little energy once the manufacturing costs41 are considered – stating that, “On average, a solar panel generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil energy required to build and install it”. It would appear he hadn’t read his source42, which stated those statistics could not be quoted in that context because it would under-estimate the impacts of PV by 30% to 250%.

In that paragraph he also attacks the film-makers statement that, “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place.” That quote has been taken out of context. That statement is not about solar PV, or wind power; it’s about the gas-fired Ivanpah Solar Array45 – a wholly different type of technology to PV.

Graph of electricity generation in the USA, 2010-2019.
Analysis of electricity generation in USA from my May 2020 blog post36: The statistics from the USA43 demonstrate that the scenario shown in the film is correct.

The article then goes on to state, “Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas.” Unfortunately that is precisely what the official energy statistics in the USA show is happening (see graph, right). From 2010 to 2019, as old coal-fired plants were retired, they were replaced with new, larger gas-fired plants using the large quantities of fracked natural gas being produced at that time. There is also academic research46 to back-up the point made in the film.

The article then goes on to state that, “in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010.”

That statement is a manipulation of objective fact:

The ‘third-quarter’ is late Summer, when power demand is at its lowest and solar hits maximum. It’s not representative of average demand and supply.

Graph of electricity generation in the UK, 2010-2019.
Analysis of electricity generation in UK from my May 2020 blog post36: The statistics from the UK44 show the percentage growth of renewable power is more influenced by the collapse in electricity demand rather than the increase in renewable generation capacity.

More significantly though, what’s been dominating energy trends in Britain has been the collapse of electricity demand (see graph, right). That is in part the result of austerity choking growth, and especially heavy industries, such as metals and chemicals, moving off-shore. Those effects are far more significant than new renewable capacity in cutting fossil fuel use – but that doesn’t even merit a mention.

Especially over 2015/16, much of the retired coal-fired capacity was matched by natural gas, not new renewable capacity. And the fact electricity demand shrank by a over a fifth from 2010 to 2019 means that in percentage terms – without adding a single wind turbine or solar panel – the proportion of renewable energy would have increased anyway.

The article then introduces the most toxic argument47 which ecomodernists promote to silence opposition: Accusations of Malthusian ‘population control’ – where again the film is misquoted:

“The film offers only one concrete solution to our predicament: the most toxic of all possible answers. ‘We really have got to start dealing with the issue of population without seeing some sort of major die-off in population, there’s no turning back.’”

That ellipsis – the ‘…’ highlighted above: That’s not skipping a few words or a sentence; it skips about 80 seconds of discussions. In running those statements together, it completely ignores the context within which each was made – specifically, the issue regarding the use of energy in agriculture.

‘Run down’

The article then concludes this section by stating:

“High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low… When wealthy people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, ‘it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.’ It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film”.

I challenge The Guardian’s editors to find any point in the transcript of the film where this is implied – and to listen to the “caveats” about rich-nation’s consumption which were made throughout the film. In fact, during that ‘ellipsis’ where Monbiot omits what is discussed, it is stated, “We have to have our abilities to consume reigned in, because we’re not good at reigning them in if there are seemingly unrestrained resources”.

George Monbiot is not promoting an objective, evidence-based view of our predicament. He is promoting an ideological, idealised vision where the affluent states can continue their current lifestyle by adopting new and more efficient technologies – a sort of ecological, “have your cake and eat it too”.

That’s not a problem: Objectively, I’m doing the same, too, by making these observations – albeit from a radically different perspective.

What we need to pursue is why George Monbiot, apparently willingly: Misquotes what is said in a film to cast slurs about right-wing conspiracies; uses academic research in a manner that is specifically excluded by its authors; misrepresents official energy statistics to imply something they do not show; and thus, overall, denies what a large body of research evidence now demonstrates to be a fair assessment of our ecological predicament.

Ecomodernism’s ‘data problem’

First advanced by figures such as Stewart Brand48, Kevin Kelly49, and Amory Lovins50, ‘ecomodernism’ came out of the American environmental movement in the 1980s proposing a simple idea: The only way to beat the destructive business process is to ‘do business’ better than they can, in an ecological way; the assumption being that higher efficiency would enable economic competition due to higher productivity, and hence profitability.

Though there are various manifestos51 and institutes52, ‘ecomodernism’ is not a coherent group. It represents a spectrum of ideas stretching from: The loosely ecological (e.g. George Monbiot); to progress-obsessed techno-Utopians (e.g. Mark Lynas53); to ideologically right-wing libertarians (e.g. Michael Shellenberger54); to corporate-oriented eco-technocrats (e.g. Jonathan Symons55).

Generally, though, ecomodernism is heavily influenced by liberal economic theory: The idea of free, globalised markets; a reliance on technological innovation and efficiency, to drive down impacts while driving up productivity; the maintenance of property rights; and moreover, an unquestioning adherence to the economic hegemony of the ‘Western lifestyle’ – and the need to perpetuate the affluence and material consumption that lifestyle demands.

This is where ecomodernism hits the reality of the ecological crisis. For all their protestations, basically ‘the thermodynamics says no’56. In particular:

  • Energy efficiency57 is not open-ended – it is a one-time saving, after which wholly new technologies must be invented, or systems significantly changed – and in general it is a diminishing return with fixed theoretical limits, where each improvement saves less-and-less;
  • The heart of this idea is ‘decoupling’58 – the assumption that the use of technology can break the link between human lifestyles and their ecological impact – which currently has no strong evidence59 to support it;
  • As with neoliberal ideology in general, ecomodernism will not accept strong ‘ecological limits’60 – despite the fact recent research confirms that after 50 years61 the ‘Limits to Growth’62 study is still on-track63; and
  • They do not consider the embodied footprint64 of their activities on resource depletion and pollution65 – and often invoke the quasi-mystical power of ‘innovation’ to solve that without proof of its feasibility.

Perhaps the area where the ignorance of ecomodernism reigns supreme is in the area of energy resources. It is assumed that we can simply turn-off fossil fuels and switch-on ‘clean’ renewables:

For the strongly technocratic end of the ecomodernist spectrum that transition is innately connected to nuclear power – despite the fact there’s not enough uranium66 to do this (they argue that there’s more than enough uranium in sea water67, despite the fact this process has yet to be commercialised, and has questionable economics68).

For the strongly ecological end of ecomodernism that transition is connected to the use of “100% renewable energy”69 – despite the growing evidence to show that there are insufficient mineral resources70, and complex barriers71, to construct the scale of infrastructure required to replace the ‘energy service’ of fossil fuels.

When I give lectures, this is the point where people are often confused: If the highly technological solution to climate change is not possible, and the renewable solution to climate change is not possible, then what option is there?

The fact people commonly ask this question demonstrates why George Monbiot, and the other ecomodernists pundits in the media, have become an obstruction to the ecological debate.

There is an entire movement around degrowth72, and the ‘simplification’73 of human lifestyles, which is not currently being referenced within the UK media debate. It challenges74 the implicit bias of mainstream environmentalism: It entails reducing material affluence, and tackling the excesses of consuming lifestyles through the national and global redistribution of resources.

Take, for example, electric cars: The media debate is presented as a divide between ‘petrol heads’ and ‘affluent green consumers’ – but neither side ever enters in to a discussion to justify maintaining the ‘private car’ as the priority for moving around.

In 2020, the Climate Change Committee75 (CCC) canvassed opinion on electric vehicles. An expert panel assembled by the Natural History Museum told the CCC76 that:

‘Forward to Progress’

“To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles, assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate, at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and 12% of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry.”

Mineral resources are a significant barrier. And the CCC’s response to this critical issue, being spelled-out by Britain’s pre-eminent geological institute was… silence. A briefing77 they published later doesn’t even mention the issue.

Put that case differently: A grid-powered trolleybus moves passengers many-times more efficiently than multiple battery-powered cars. So where is ‘the lobby’ for the elimination of cars? It does exist78, but gets little media coverage as it challenges the dominant assumptions of the consumer lifestyle – in this case, the primacy of the ‘private car’.

Renewable energy and green technologies, such as electric cars, are dependent upon mass electrification; and as a result, a huge expansion79 in metal production using resources80 which have a finite, limited supply. There is also growing evidence that the extraction of those resources across the globe could be especially damaging to biodiversity 81.

Some of these metals – such as copper, cobalt, or rare earths – are so limited that they are a barrier to a ‘Green New Deal’-type plan82; and the energy return of renewable technologies will continually fall83 in the future, as these metals deplete, as the energy used in their extraction84 increases. Even if we ‘innovate’, such as swapping lithium with sodium85 in batteries, trace amounts of rare earths and other metals are still required; and the yet to be invented nano-technologies proposed as substitutes have an uncertain efficiency or efficacy.

How then can groups promoting the ‘Green New Deal’ – such as the ‘Zero Carbon Britain’86 (ZCB) – advocate 100% renewable energy without also advising of the resource or pollution risks inherent in that project? The reason, from my own experience arguing with ZCB for over a decade, is they just ignore them: They ignore them because ‘people in power’ – like the CCC – don’t want to hear them, and so they exclude them from their considerations.

What is certain is that while a segment of the globally affluent may be able to scrape a carbon-free lifestyle, there are not sufficient resources to allow everyone else87 on the planet to consume in that way. And the over-riding reliance on a single metric to judge progress – carbon emissions – is leading to a willing ignorance over both the global pollution, resource depletion, or biodiversity loss, that would result from such a ‘green’ future.

George’s fallacies on fermentation

Firstly, as others have demanded my opinion on this recently, do I think that George Monbiot is being funded by corporate interests to talk about precision fermentation?

I really don’t think that matters at all! Whether he’s being funded or not doesn’t change the underlying technical arguments; and to raise that as an issue distracts from the evidence for why he is wrong. Motive is not the issue here; the issue is evidence.

Let’s address the big issue first: Technically there is no ‘food production’ crisis!

As George Monbiot commented in his interview with Owen Jones88, world hunger is rising – now probably extending to a billion people or more, including in the most developed states. That last part is the critical issue: The reason people in affluent states skip meals is the same reason those in poor states die of malnutrition – it’s an issue of allocation, not production.

The reasons for world hunger89 and malnutrition in both poor and rich states are variously, depending upon the location, the result of:

  • Economic inequality;
  • Climate change;
  • Conflict or displacement;
  • Natural disasters;
  • Urbanisation and/or isolation from the land, restricting access to food except by payment;
  • Poor diet due to the economic or social barriers to accessing good quality food; and
  • Social/state imposed barriers restricting access to land or food by certain groups.

Precision fermentation90 is the idea that by using genetically engineered micro-organisms, grown inside industrial vats, protein can be produced far more ‘efficiently’; and with secondary processing and chemical additives, those simple proteins can be engineered into ‘nutritious’ meat substitutes91.

Given that brief summary, does anything stated there address the points in the list above of the primary reasons behind global hunger? No.

To even talk about precision fermentation in the same context as hunger belittles the the global inequalities92 that drive it; and distracts from the necessary changes93 to national and global governance94 in order to address those issues.

‘The Champagne Glass Graph’, Oxfam, 2015.
‘The Champagne Glass Graph’ – made popular by the UN Human Development Report95 in 1992, then resurrected by Oxfam in their ‘Extreme Carbon Inequality’96 reports – this shows the unequal share of global carbon emissions, but it’s general proportions are also correct for energy consumption, metal consumption, digital devices, etc.

The root of global hunger is inequality: Global inequality is not the ‘fault’ of those who are hungry; it is due to the ‘choices’ of those running national and global governance systems. That system is dominated by a globally affluent elite (see graph, right): Where the 10% of the world’s population95 benefiting from that mechanism consume half of everything96; while the ‘bottom half’ consume just 10%.

Let’s be absolutely clear on this: There is a Human Right to Food97. The fact hundreds of millions are hungry, yet enough food is produced for all, is a matter of political ‘choice’98, not ‘fate’.

I’ve read George Monbiot’s book, ‘Regenesis’99. Personally, I’ve found his recent books rather rambling – lamenting the ills of the world, yet ignoring the ‘radical’ solutions available if he could remove his mental shackles to society, ‘as it is’. We need to stop worrying about how bad things are, and concentrate on the simplest ways to make them better.

For example, in chapter 5 he says:

“City farms, allotments, and guerrilla gardens help us to feel a sense of connection to the land and engage our minds and hands in satisfying work. But, with one or two exceptions it’s unlikely to satisfy more than a tiny fraction of demand. The reason should be obvious: land in cities is scarce and expensive.”

Why is land in cities expensive? Because it is owned by a minute minority of the population called ‘landlords’. Why is that an ecological issue?

Climate change is a physical restriction on humanity. How much food you can grow on a square metre of soil is also a physical restriction. ‘Property rights’ are completely abstract100they do not exist, just like the monetary values property rights are traded with. They are not a ‘physical’ restriction.

If we are truly saying that climate change and ecological breakdown are ‘existential’ – that society lives or dies by what we do in the next decade – who could support a wholly ‘abstract’ division of the land in a way which prevents people from providing their needs in the most low impact way?

Once again, we come back to the issue of inequality: In Britain, less than 1%101 of the population own ~50% of the land. In ‘Regenesis’, George argues that the intellectual property rights on the technological solutions to climate change must be weakened. Why, then, can’t we also restrict property rights on the land, or cap land values or tax excess wealth, to facilitate low impact lifestyles?

In a short film102 on ‘Regenesis’, George states:

“…in Finland, scientists are brewing-up an entirely different kind of food. Inside these tanks, protein is being produced by… bacteria. The only inputs are water, carbon from the air, a sprinkling of nutrients and electricity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. And the only waste product… is water.”

‘Forward to Progress’

In the previous section I outlined the problems with ideas like the ‘Green New Deal’, and the material and geopolitical barriers to expanding renewable energy to match fossil fuels. By advocating the use of electricity to produce protein – perhaps up to 25 times more103 energy per unit of protein – it necessarily involves: A certain level of mineral extraction; a certain level of pollution; and a certain level of biodiversity loss as a result of those operations.

Are any of those impacts factored into George’s presentation of the process? No.

Finland is a good example: While 26% of their electricity comes from hydro and wind, around the same comes from nuclear – and that is projected to rise as their new, delayed, and massively over-budget EPR nuclear plant comes on-line. Does the fermentation process, therefore, consume uranium and produce high-level nuclear waste? Arguably yes. Is that considered in George’s model? No.

I don’t want to labour the point, but this model of how the process works is highly misleading: It does not measure the related impacts of creating the electricity; or extracting and purifying the artificial nutrients; or the associated energy and pollution costs of processing the ‘protein gloop’ into ‘cultured meat’. It is very much like the nuclear industry’s argument that ‘nuclear power doesn’t emit carbon dioxide’; and yet from the concrete in the reactor, to ore processing at the uranium mine, greenhouse gases are embodied throughout that process.

In affluent states the major source of protein is meat; but in poor states the major source of protein is vegetables and cereals104. How does that square with Monbiot’s assumption that meat production for the global population105 is a homogeneous issue?

Likewise, humans need roughly 50g to 60g106 of protein per day. On average most countries scrape that amount in their national diet; but in the affluent world people on average consume at least twice that107 amount or more. Does George Monbiot discuss the inequality of global protein intakes, and how that too leads to damaging health impacts, just as too little protein does? Not that I can find.

Turning to George Monbiot’s recent column108 in The Guardian, we see this same simplistic, narrow-boundary analysis applied as a justification:

“The first is to shrink to a remarkable degree the footprint of food production. One paper estimates that precision fermentation using methanol needs 1,700 times less land than the most efficient agricultural means of producing protein: soy grown in the US. This suggests it might use, respectively, 138,000 and 157,000 times less land than the least efficient means: beef and lamb production.”

According to both his book and his column, then, the choice is between intensive animal agriculture, intensive soy production, or precision fermentation: That’s an entirely ‘false dilemma’109, ignoring the large body of evidence on viable alternative options.

His book, ‘Regenesis’, doesn’t discuss ‘permaculture’110, or ‘integrated polyculture’111 – even though recent research112 shows those systems to be far less polluting, and as much if not more113 productive, and economically far more beneficial to those involved, than the intensive farming system he rails against. Even urban allotments114 – which he dismisses in the book – are as good as, if not more115 productive than intensive agriculture, with higher levels of biodiversity116.

If we know there are easily implementable systems that can produce the same, if not more food, with less impacts, why doesn’t George evaluate these ‘other’ options? Why doesn’t he investigate the the details behind why a third of the world’s food is grown by ‘small farmers’ using only a quarter117 of the farmed land area? (hence, a third-more productive than intensive agriculture) And how does his characterisation of the problem of protein production fit to the varied models of small-scale agriculture – or indigenous animal herders or hunters – who do not practise intensive production? These alternatives are dismissed without investigation.

Interviewed by Aaron Bastani118 – the man who wrote the book on, ‘Fully-Automated Luxury Communism’119 – one-hour in George states:

“By doing it this way you can localise your food production, and you can it can be much cheaper. You’re not paying soft currencies for hard currencies, you’re not using your local currency to buy stuff on the dollar market. You’re producing your own food locally, and it could have a massive impact in reducing hunger but also in allowing people to assert sovereignty over their own food supply.”

Those points apply even more strongly to locally-based agriculture, or small-scale production on plots or urban allotments, than to precision fermentation.

He also fails to note the up-front demand for electricity, water, concentrated nutrients, and a processing capacity to turn the ‘protein gloop’ into an appetising foodstuff. Are those factors which are all locally available? Clearly, not. Even ‘locally produced’ solar electricity requires photovoltaic panels which are the product of a globalised mining, manufacturing, and logistics chain, that operates on the hard ‘dollar’ currencies he’s being critical of.

George Monbiot’s analysis of the land required to support ‘cultured meat’ is incomplete. It doesn’t include the land-take of the system’s ‘externalities’120 such as: Power generation; nutrient production; or the land mined for metal or phosphate resources. Unless that essential part of the system is included, he is not making a ‘like-for-like’ comparison, and so no claims can be made as to its advantage.

‘Resistance is Fertile’

In contrast, what do localised permaculture or integrated polyculture systems depend upon? Seeds. Literally, the most complex part of a local food system is developing the right seed variety for the local climatic conditions; and once obtained, they can be simply grown and shared – no hard currencies or mechanised logistics chains required.

Small-scale animal agriculture, integrated into fodder cover and nutrient cycling, may be part of that process – especially at higher latitudes where the growing season is shorter. That, again, is something that requires a local assessment of the best options for food production. But to reduce this entire debate to, “Technology Will Save Us All!”, is simplistic, illogical, and not based upon evidence.

I have wrestled with ‘Regenesis’ since I read it. His recent Guardian columns only add to my concern about his public pronouncements. I can rationalise their flaws and failures in only one way: The levels of compromise George Monbiot engages in, to maintain his position within the media environment, mean that he can no longer represent ecological reality to his audience.

Conclusion: If ecomodernism’s tinkering has failed, it suggests that their model is wrong

Multi-level marketing, created off the back of the social media boom, is as revolutionary as the fears raised by Vance Packard121 about the marketing boom of the 1950s122. Whether by direct payment, goods-in-kind, or just because of the ‘group identity’ it confers, the manipulation of ‘social influencers’123 by political, financial, and industrial interests, represents a new ‘wild west’ in – to use Edward Bernays’ famous phrase – ‘The Engineering of Consent’124.

George Monbiot is such an influencer – and a valued one as his audience is largely made-up of the affluent middle class with disposable incomes. And in the marketing of that message – unlike other advertisers – he is wholly unaccountable as he ‘accentuates the positive’125 and buries the bad news.

Although Jonathon Porritt may have felt either the honesty, or entitlement to state the assumptions behind the ‘ecomodernist’ viewpoint, many do not. They bend and twist their ideas to avoid ever confronting reality: That their technocratic machinations are devised to maintain their material entitlements.

We must revivify the ‘radicalism’126 that Porritt and others excluded from the movement in the 1980s as they sought compromise with the establishment; and reinvigorate the deep ecological debate127 on ‘materialism’ and ‘inequality’128 that has been suppressed for too long.

Ecomodernism can never address the economic and social inequalities which benefit the globally affluent, while creating suffering or hunger for other living beings (humans included). Just like the establishment’s failure to address colonialism, doing so would question their own political and economic advantage in the here-and-now – raising difficult questions of justice and accountability for past policies.

When I raise the issue of class identity, affluence, and the ecological crisis, a number of people in the environment movement – especially of the ‘ecomodernist persuasion’ – are driven to apoplexy.

I understand that: It challenges the very basis of their self-identity, and hence their security and well-being. But it’s equally valid to require anyone objecting to this approach, to view the issue from the opposite side: From the majority who are economically excluded from the debate; and why the low-tech/low impact options for change are excluded from that debate, as the privileged pundits leading it feel uncomfortable talking about them.

Through his columns in The Guardian, and his recent book, George Monbiot has created talking points that seek an ecologically-benign ‘stasis’ in the human system – ignoring the needs and current predicament of the nationally and globally poor: To even mention the word ‘hunger’ in the context of precision fermantation, I find offensive; to talk of technocratic solutions that are reliant upon globalised commodity systems, when the barriers to accessing food are the result of the neocolonial domination of the resource production, I find repugnant.

What I have not raised here is his ‘Reboot Food’129 initiative, and in particular his ‘manifesto’130 – including its: Calls to legalising gene editing (without specifying which of the many processes available should be made ‘legal’); calls for ‘rewilding’ (without specifying what that means, and to what extent ‘rewilding people’ is permitted’); and calls for greater food labelling (which presumes the perpetuation of the highly centralised industrial food production and distribution system). That ‘manifesto’ deserves a deep-dive of its own!

‘Shareholder Value’

If ‘ecomodernism’ is focussed on enabling certain technological or consumer choices, when many are excluded from those choices not simply by price, but by the fact they can barely scrape the basics for a viable lifestyle, then how is that debate going to ever create a mass movement for change? Worse still, the political-right that George seems so afraid of, will weaponise that failure to engage across the social spectrum, to obstruct change, and alienate those making such arguments.

George Monbiot has a highly privileged position which he could use positively: He could deconstruct the economic and social processes that created his privilege; and through that process, both advocate for radical ecological change, and build bridges with those economically excluded from the advantage that he has benefited from.

He chooses not to do that. Instead, he advocates for ‘solutions’ which preserve the economic advantage of the Western lifestyle above any criticism that it is physically and practically beyond salvage.

We need seeds, not solenoids; plots not vats; gardens, not economic globalism. Above all we need land rights, and access to land, to disengage from the global economic system that is the root of human exploitation and ecological destruction. For a catchy soundbite to encompass that, let’s say, “we need to rewild the people alongside all the other animals”.

Title slide for Ramblinactivist’s video 2022/39.
Click to watch the YouTube video of this post

As I have reviewed here: George Monbiot’s representation of ecological issues in the media has become increasingly narrow; biased towards the perpetuation of affluence and establishment power; and as a result, he is apparently twisting, misquoting, or stating incomplete information, in order to maintain that position. What he promotes is an ‘extreme centrism’, which, through highly questionable technocratic schemes, seeks to preserve the entitlements of affluence against the inevitable crash of that lifestyle. As a result, he is sanitising ecological destruction and global inequality, to maintain the artificial lifestyle of the affluent minority who have benefited the most from industrialisation – which, in the end, is what has created the ecological crisis, and which must be curtailed to avert it.

A Stroll Inside King Charles III’s $25 Billion Real Estate Empire

Inside King Charles III’s $25 Billion Real Estate Empire

https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2022/10/21/inside-king-charles-iiis-25-billion-real-estate-empire/

Giacomo Tognini Forbes Staff Staff Writer, Wealth Team. Oct 21, 2022,

The new British monarch lords over seven palaces, 10 castles, 12 homes, 56 cottages, and 14 ancient ruins where he can hang up his crown

Charles III’s official coronation may not occur until May 6, but the new British monarch has already inherited a $25 billion real estate portfolio fit for a king.

When he acceded the throne in September, the 73-year-old sovereign assumed control of a $42 billion empire, much of it in real estate. Forbes scoured property records, annual reports, audits, archives and legislative documents to find all of the king’s new possessions. His holdings span from Buckingham Palace­the official headquarters of the monarchy, which Forbes estimates is worth $4.9 billion­to Highgrove House, a country residence in Gloucestershire that Charles first purchased in 1980 for £865,000 ($3.7 million today,) now valued at $39 million.

Although he has only had the crown for a few weeks, Charles is expected to break with seven generations of tradition and reject Buckingham Palace as his London residence to remain in his current home at Clarence House (estimated value: $72 million.) But he will also reportedly continue to spend some time at Highgrove. That means he’ll have to pay about $740,000 in annual rent to his son William, who succeeded him as Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall and now holds Highgrove under the Duchy of Cornwall.

KING OF THESE CASTLES

Charles III’s $25 billion real estate empire is spread across the United Kingdom as well as two cottages in Transylvania. Here are all the properties where he can stow thrones.

Those properties are part of a vast collection of at least seven palaces, 10 castles, 12 homes, 56 holiday cottages and 14 ancient ruins, per Forbes’ count. Aside from Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Sandringham House in Norfolk, which he inherited from the Queen and now personally owns, none of these opulent residences and historic monuments are directly owned by the King. Most are held by the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall, institutions held “in right of the Crown” for the duration of his reign. Others are controlled by the monarchy itself “in trust” for his successors and the nation, while another four properties are held by two foundations which the King established when he was Prince of Wales.

And it’s not just palaces and countryside homes: through the Crown Estate and the Duchies, Charles now also oversees $12.9 billion in commercial, residential and agricultural properties throughout the U.K., ranging from Ascot Racecourse and the Oval cricket ground to at least three golf courses, a private airfield and the Savoy Chapel in Westminster, the private church of the reigning monarch. The Crown also holds one of England’s most famous monuments, Stonehenge, which was given “to the nation” in 1918 by Cecil Chubb, a local resident who purchased it for £6,600 in 1915 (about $590,000 today).

As the head of state in 15 Commonwealth realms­ in addition to 13 British territories and three crown dependencies­ Charles also has access to at least 49 residences for state visits across the globe, at the homes of his representatives in each nation. Whether he’s traveling to Canada (Rideau Hall in Ottawa,) the Caribbean (King’s House in Jamaica) or the Pacific (Admiralty House in Sydney,) the new monarch always has a place to rest the head that wears the crown.

Closer to home, the lavish estates, extravagant mansions and crumbling ruins maintained by the British monarchy, royal foundations or by the King personally are spread throughout three of the four nations of the United Kingdom, plus two cottages in Transylvania. And there used to be more: between 1998 and 1999, the Crown Estate ceded ownership of six castles, two palaces and one fort in Scotland ­including the millennium-old Edinburgh Castle­to the Scottish government.

But only a small number of homes­ fourteen­ serve as official residences of the King and the royal family. Two more royal residences are personally owned by other family members­ Charles’s sister, Princess Anne, owns Gatcombe Park in Gloucestershire (estimated value: $29 million), while the Duke of Gloucester, his first cousin once removed, has put his Barnwell Manor in Northamptonshire up for sale for $5.4 million. Another of Charles’ new digs, the royal palace in Northern Ireland at Hillsborough Castle, is owned directly by the British government, which purchased it in 1925 for £24,000 (or $1.3 million today.)

Average citizens can also get in on a piece of the royal lifestyle: the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster operate 56 holiday homes and cottages across England, Wales and the Isles of Scilly that can be rented out, while the Prince of Wales’ Charitable Fund operates two bed-and-breakfasts in Romania. Everything else, including medieval masterpieces such as the Tower of London and Caernarfon Castle, is a tourist attraction managed by various charities and trusts.

Forbes valued these properties with the help of estimates provided by Lenka Dušková Munter, a sales specialist for historical properties at Czech real estate agency Luxent, and Colby Short, co-founder and CEO of estate agent website GetAgent.co.uk. Here’s a breakdown of King Charles III’s real estate empire.

ENGLAND

BUCKINGHAM PALACE

Est. Value: $4.9 BILLION
The official residence of the royal family since 1837, the 775-room palace with a private swimming pool is also King Charles’s birthplace. First purchased by George III in 1761 when it was still a house, construction to convert it into a palace began in 1820 and only completed in 1847 with the addition of a new wing for Queen Victoria’s growing family, financed largely by the sale of the Royal Pavilion in Brighton for £53,000 ($5.4 million today.) Despite an extensive renovation which began in 2017 and will cost more than $400 million, Charles is known to dislike the “big house.”

HAMPTON COURT PALACE

Est. Value: $1.2 B
Known as the Tudor Palace, Hampton Court is where King Henry VIII spent most of his time, with all six of his wives: by the 1530s, he had added a hotel, theater and numerous works of art; visitors can now see Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar plus works by Caravaggio and Rembrandt. The palace also features a grand colonnade, Fountain Court­designed by Sir Christopher Wren­which had a cameo in the second season of Netflix’s Bridgerton.

TOWER OF LONDON
Est. Value: $1.1 B
Built by William the Conqueror in the late 11th century, the towering castle at the heart of London is home to the Crown Jewels, worth an estimated $4 billion. Three Queens of England­Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Jane Grey­were executed here in the 1500s.

WINDSOR CASTLE
Est. Value: $743 MILLION
Windsor Castle was completed in 1086, one year before William the Conqueror’s death. In 1377, King Edward III spent £50,000 (some $57 million today) to convert it from a military fort into a gothic palace­the largest expense of any medieval king on a single building. Over its nearly thousand-year history, the castle been home to 40 monarchs and is still a favorite of the royal family. The surrounding estate includes Windsor Great Park, golf courses and Ascot Racecourse.

ST. JAMES’S PALACE
Est. Value: $700 M
Overlooking Green Park and St. James’s Park in London­two of the eight royal parks in the capital held by the Crown­St. James’s Palace was once the home of Elizabeth I during the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1558. More recently, it was also the location of King Charles’s accession ceremony on September 10.

LANCASTER CASTLE
Est. value: $674 M
Over its thousand-plus-year history, Lancaster Castle has served as a Roman fort, the site of witch trials and as a prison­until it was decommissioned and converted into a tourist attraction in 2011.

KENSINGTON PALACE
Est. Value: $630 M
The childhood home of Prince William and Prince Harry, Kensington was known as the “party palace” in the late 17th century for hosting extravagant balls where guests “ate, drank, gambled and flirted until dawn.” The palace is still William and Kate’s official London residence, while Prince Harry and Meghan Markle live in a $23 million mansion in Montecito, California, replete with 9 bedrooms, 19 bathrooms, a private pool, spa, theater and tennis court.

BANQUETING HOUSE
Est. Value: $296 M
The only remnant of the Palace of Whitehall­once the largest palace in Europe until its destruction in a fire in 1698­Banqueting House in London is home to a 2,420-square-foot ceiling painting by Peter Paul Rubens commissioned by Charles I in 1629. (Rubens was paid £3,000 for the work­some $540,000 today­plus a heavy gold chain.) It’s also where Charles I met a gruesome end on January 30, 1649: just two decades after commissioning the Rubens ceiling, he walked under it and was then executed outside Banqueting House.

CARISBROOKE CASTLE
Est. value: $225 M
Located on the Isle of Wight, Carisbrooke Castle carries much darker memories for the royals: After its capture by parliamentary forces in 1642 during the English Civil War, the dethroned King Charles I was imprisoned there in the years leading up to his execution.

ELTHAM PALACE
Est. Value: $211 M
Described as “unique marriage between a medieval and Tudor palace and a 1930s millionaire’s mansion,” Eltham Palace was used as a royal palace by monarchs who hunted in the surrounding parks from the 14th to the 16th century. Henry VIII, the last king to reside there, spent his childhood at Eltham. In 1933, millionaires Stephen and Virginia Courtauld took a 99-year-lease on the palace from the Crown and installed a bomb shelter in the basement during World War II; they eventually moved out in 1944 after growing tired of the repeated air raids from the German Luftwaffe.

THATCHED HOUSE LODGE
Est. Value: $131 M
Thatched House Lodge is a Regency-era home built in the early 18th century on a 4-acre estate in Richmond Park, the largest park in London and another royal possession. The property is home to Queen Elizabeth’s first cousin Princess Alexandra, who has rented it from the Crown Estate since 1963 and paid a £670,000 premium ($1.4 million today) to extend the lease in 1994.

RESTORMEL MANOR
(14 Properties) Est. Value: $86 M
The Duchy of Cornwall’s 14 holiday properties near the medieval town of Lostwithiel in Cornwall are housed in and around Restormel Manor, a 500-year-old Gothic-style mansion with a steam room, sauna, tennis court and an indoor heated swimming pool. But living like an English lord is pricey: one week at the nine-bedroom Restormel Manor property in December will cost $4,000.

SANDRINGHAM ESTATE
Est. Value: $73 M
One of two properties personally owned by King Charles, which he inherited from his late mother, Sandringham in Norfolk has been in the royal family since 1862. The estate includes the Royal Studs, a thoroughbred horse farm first established in 1886, as well as rental properties spread across 13 nearby villages­with a notorious “no cats” policy for would-be renters, reportedly due to the Queen’s fears the felines would kill the pheasants and partridges kept as game birds. Charles is also reportedly looking to sell some of the Queen’s prized race horses and scale down the Royal Studs.

CLARENCE HOUSE
Est. Value: $72 M
King Charles’s longtime home is one of the last surviving aristocratic townhouses in London, a stuccoed mansion completed in 1827 at the cost of £22,232 ($2 million today)­more than double the original estimate. The Queen also lived there while she was still a princess, and it served as the home of her mother’s impressive art collection, featuring works by Fabergé and John Piper.

KEW PALACE
Est. Value: $70 M
Set among the Royal Botanic Gardens­home to more than 50,000 plants including rare and threatened species housed in a grand Victorian-era greenhouse­Kew Palace was the private retreat of King George III during a long period of mental illness, starting in 1788. The gardens are also home to the Chinese-style Great Pagoda, a 163-foot-tall tower with 80 dragons carved from gilded wood. The dragons, removed in 1784 and restored in 2018, were rumored to have been sold to pay off King George IV’s gambling debts.

DOVER CASTLE
Est. Value: $66 M
Standing guard over the Strait of Dover, the shortest sea crossing between England and Europe, Dover Castle originated as a Roman fort in 43 CE. Another castle on the site was erected in 1066 by William the Conqueror, who captured the city after the Battle of Hastings. The structure that stands today was established by Henry II in 1189. And while British royals haven’t used the castle since 1625, it’s been used in warfare throughout the centuries, including as a garrison for 16,000 troops during the First World War, a hospital in World War II and as a backup seat of government in case of a nuclear attack during the Cold War.

CARLISLE CASTLE
Est. value: $45 M
Located about ten miles south of the modern English-Scottish border, Carlisle Castle served as the Kingdom of England’s fortress against the Scots for half a century until the two realms were united in 1603. Built on the ruins of a Roman fort that provided support for garrisons on Hadrian’s Wall, the castle was besieged seven times by the Scots between 1173 and 1461, when it was again besieged during the English Wars of the Roses. It served as a base for Edward I in 1296; the prison of Mary, Queen of Scots in 1567; and as a British army barracks from the 1820s until 1959.

BAGSHOT PARK
Est. Value: $39 M
Built in 1879 on the orders of Queen Victoria as a home for her third son, Prince Arthur, Bagshot Park in Surrey is a Tudor Gothic-style mansion set on 52 acres of gardens, including stables and a working farm. Prince Edward, Charles’s youngest brother, has lived there since 1998, paying roughly $100,000 in annual rent to the Crown Estate. Charles’ other brother, Prince Andrew, lives a 20-minute drive away at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, which he rented with a 75-year-lease in 2003 for a one-time payment of £1 million (or $1.8 million now).

HIGHGROVE HOUSE
Est. Value: $39 M
King Charles’ longtime family home, Highgrove was built in 1798 and acquired by the then-Prince of Wales in 1980. The estate is home to 15 acres of organic gardens with heritage varieties of fruits and vegetables and an adjacent shop where visitors can buy eggs, wine and spirits made on the property. It’s also a short drive from Ray Mill House, the private home of Charles’ wife, Camilla, the Queen Consort. She purchased the six-bedroom countryside cottage for £850,000 ($1.7 million today) in January 1996, a year after her divorce from her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles­and just seven months before Charles’s own divorce with Princess Diana in August that year. Diana died a year later, in August 1997.

FROGMORE HOUSE
Est. Value: $35 M
Named for the numerous amphibians that live in the marshes around the property, Frogmore House was purchased by King George III in 1792 as a country retreat for his wife, Queen Charlotte. The mansion’s Britannia Room features paintings, porcelain and furniture taken from the interior of the royal yacht, HMY Britannia, after it was decommissioned in 1997. The Frogmore estate is also home to the mausoleum of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and Frogmore Cottage, the U.K. residence of Prince Harry and Meghan. In September 2020, the couple repaid $3.2 million in refurbishing expenses, originally covered by British taxpayers.

CHESTER CASTLE
Est. Value: $22 M
One of the many castles built by William the Conqueror in 1070, Chester Castle served as the military headquarters for Henry III’s and Edward I’s conquest of Wales, and as a Royalist headquarters during the English Civil War. The castle, which was used by the British military until 1999, features a chapel with wall paintings dating to 1240.

OSBORNE HOUSE
Est. Value: $19 M
This Italianate mansion was purchased by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1845 for £28,000 ($3 million today) as a seaside retreat on the Isle of Wight. The eclectic mansion was designed with architectural features drawn from around the world: the Italian palazzo-style home with extensive terraces; the Indian-style Durbar Wing, in honor of Victoria’s status as Empress of India; and the Swiss Cottage, an “educational tool” for the royal children, where they grew fruit, flowers and vegetables.

DUCHY OF LANCASTER COTTAGES
(16 Properties) Est. Value: $12 M
The Duchy of Lancaster owns fifteen holiday cottages in Scarborough, a seaside resort located near North York Moors national park. A one-night stay at the 8-bedroom Scalby Lodge in late November will set you back some $720. Root Farm Cottage is a two-bedroom property in the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, forming part of the Whitewell Estate, last visited by the Queen Elizabeth in 2006 for her 80th birthday celebrations.

LOSKEYLE COTTAGES
(2 Properties) Est. Value: $4.1 M
The Duchy of Cornwall owns four holiday cottages­with complimentary fishing for guests­in St Tudy, a small countryside village in Cornwall. A seven-night stay in November in Menhenick, a two-story, three-bedroom barn, costs $735.

DOLPHIN HOUSE
Est. Value: $2 M
The six-bedroom home on the island of Tresco is housed in an old granite rectory, with hilltop views of the Atlantic Ocean and the 19th-century Round Island lighthouse.

TAMARISK
Est. Value: $1.5 M
Tamarisk is a four-bedroom cottage on Garrison Hill in Hugh Town on the island of St. Mary’s. Its name comes from the tamarisk trees on the property, a flowering plant mentioned in the Old Testament and the Iliad. While still an official royal residence, Charles and Diana snubbed the home on their vacations to the Isles of Scilly, preferring to stay with friends in Tresco.

BERKHAMSTED CASTLE
Before it crumbled into ruins, Berkhamsted Castle was a motte-and-bailey built out of timber in 1070. It was briefly the home of Thomas Becket, then Archbishop of Canterbury, who rebuilt the castle in stone between 1155 and 1164. From 1225 to 1272, it was refurbished and expanded to serve as the palace of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, believed to be the richest man in England at the time.

BOLINGBROKE CASTLE
King Henry IV was born in the 13th-century Bolingbroke Castle in 1367, but all that remains are the sunken hexagonal walls and surrounding earthworks.

CROMWELL’S CASTLE
One of the few remaining fortifications from the Interregnum­the period between 1649 and 1660 when Oliver Cromwell ruled England after executing Charles I­Cromwell’s Castle is a circular gun tower built in 1651, after Cromwell’s forces recaptured the Isles of Scilly from the royalists.

KING CHARLES’S CASTLE
Adjacent to Cromwell’s castle on the island of Tresco, King Charles’s Castle was built during the reign of King Edward VI and renamed by pro-Charles I royalists during the English Civil War. The gambit didn’t work­parliamentarian troops bypassed the now-ruined castle by landing on the other side of Tresco in 1651.

LAUNCESTON CASTLE
Launceston Castle is a ruined 13th-century round tower and the remnants of a castle originally built by William the Conqueror for his half-brother. It later served as a prison where George Fox, founder of the Quakers, was detained in 1656 and held executions until 1821.

LYDFORD CASTLE
Lydford Castle sits on the western edge of Dartmoor national park, a vast expanse of moorlands where the Duchy of Cornwall owns a third of the land. The 12th-century square castle was a prison from the Middle Ages until the 1700s.

MAIDEN CASTLE
Described as “one of the largest and most complex Iron Age hillforts in Europe,” Maiden Castle is the size of 50 soccer pitches, with enormous ramparts dating to the 1st century BCE.

PEVERIL CASTLE
Now in ruins, Peveril Castle, was one of the earliest Norman fortresses in England, with a keep built by Henry II in 1176.

RESTORMEL CASTLE
Once a “luxurious retreat” in the 14th century and the home of Edward, the first Duke of Cornwall, Restormel Castle is now a ruin with a large circular keep.

ST. MARY’S COTTAGES
(3 properties)
Besides Tamarisk, the Duchy of Cornwall also owns three more holiday homes on St. Mary’s, including a two-bedroom property in a 17th-century guard house and another housed in a former gun battery.

TICKHILL CASTLE
Now occupied by a private tenant who rents the land from the Duchy of Lancaster, the 11th-century Tickhill Castle was expanded by several English kings until its decline during the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century: King Henry I built a gatehouse and a wall with ramparts in 1130, and Henry II added a new keep and a stone bridge in 1182.

TINTAGEL CASTLE
Located on the rugged northern coast of Cornwall, little remains of this 13th-century castle.

TRESCO COTTAGES
(15 properties)
The Duchy of Cornwall­which owns nearly all of the land on the Isles of Scilly­has 15 holiday cottages on the island of Tresco, in addition to Dolphin House.

TREMATON CASTLE
The ruins of Trematon Castle in eastern Cornwall were converted into a private garden with evergreen oaks and wild flowers in 2012, when it was leased by garden designers Julian and Isabel Bannerman from the Duchy of Cornwall.

TUTBURY CASTLE
Built in 1071 for Norman baron Henry de Ferrers, this now-ruined castle was confiscated by Henry III during the Second Barons’ War in 1267. Elizabeth I imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots at Tutbury multiple times between 1569 and 1585, when she was moved 80 miles south to Fotheringhay Castle and executed.

WALES

CAERNARFON CASTLE
Est. Value: $289 M
Inspired by imperial Roman architecture and the walls of ancient Constantinople, the 13th-century Caernarfon Castle is ringed by 2,400 feet of stone walls studded with 12 octagonal towers and surrounded by a moat. King Edward I ordered its construction in 1283 after the conquest of Wales, but the colossal structure took 47 years and £25,000 (more than $23 million today) to complete­roughly 90% of England’s annual income at the time. It also holds a special resonance to the new king: Charles was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon in 1969.

LLWYNYWERMOD
Est. Value: $3.9 M
Located near the mountains of Brecon Beacons national park, Llwynywermod was King Charles III’s Welsh retreat while he was Prince of Wales. The 192-acre estate is now in the hands of his son, Prince William, who has his own Welsh connection: The wedding ring he gave Kate Middleton in 2011 is made of Welsh gold, and the couple lived on the isle of Anglesey off the northwest coast of Wales while William worked as a search-and-rescue helicopter pilot.

MYDDFAI COTTAGES
(2 properties)
The Duchy of Cornwall owns two cottages on the Llwynywermod estate, housed in converted barns. Guests can expect to pay $1,000 for a weeklong stay at the smaller two-bedroom West Range cottage for the privilege of being William and Kate’s neighbor.

OGMORE CASTLE
The oval-shaped ruins of Ogmore Castle feature a twelfth-century stone keep and date to 1116, when the castle was founded by the Norman de Londres family.

ROMANIA

THE PRINCE OF WALES’S GUESTHOUSE
Est. value: $1.1 M
One of only two properties held by King Charles outside of the U.K., he purchased this private nature retreat and guesthouse in the rural Transylvanian village of Valea Z lanului­known locally by its Hungarian moniker Zalánpatak­through Ecologic Transilvania SRL, a Romanian subsidiary of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund. Visitors can go horse riding at the property’s stables or take advantage of a wood-fired “salty hot-tub” and a mineral water pool in the summer, or horse-drawn sleigh rides with mulled wine in the winter.

THE PRINCE OF WALES’S HOUSE
Est. value: $1.1 M
Located a two-hour drive west of Valea Z lanului in the town of Viscri, Charles’s second Romanian property is a bed and breakfast that doubles as a traditional crafts and training center housed in an 18th-century Saxon home. Beyond these two homes, Charles has another, centuries-old link to Transylvania: he is a distant relative of Vlad the Impaler, who ruled what is now Romania in the 15th century and served as the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

SCOTLAND

BALMORAL CASTLE
Est. Value: $118 M
Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite residence, she spent her final days at Balmoral before she died on September 8 at age 96. Purchased by Prince Albert for his wife, Queen Victoria, in 1852 for £32,000 ($3.9 million today,) the castle was built in the Scottish Baronial style out of local white granite. The 50,000-acre estate includes a golf course, woodlands, a bridge across the river Dee designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and an obelisk commemorating Prince Albert. Along with Sandringham, it’s one of two properties personally owned by King Charles, which he inherited from the Queen.

PALACE OF HOLYROOD HOUSE
Est. Value: $83 M
The official residence of the monarchy in Scotland, Holyroodhouse sits on one end of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, which connects the palace to Edinburgh Castle. Founded by King David I of Scotland as an Augustinian monastery in 1128­a structure that’s still intact today as Holyrood Abbey­James IV built a palace on the grounds in 1501, and later residents included Mary, Queen of Scots. (A box containing her hair is on display in her former chambers.) The palace rooms feature treasures from the Royal Collection, including the Darnley Jewel, a heart-shaped gold locket studded with Burmese rubies and Indian emerald.

DUMFRIES HOUSE
Est. Value: $46 M
Set on 2,000 acres of land in rural Ayrshire in southwestern Scotland, Dumfries House is a Palladian, 18th-century mansion purchased by Charles in 2007 for £45 million (or $77 million today) through a trust. Built in 1759 by William Chrichton-Dalrymple, the Earl of Dumfries, and designed by the architect Robert Adam and his two brothers, the home is known for retaining its original 18th-century furniture from the workshop of Thomas Chippendale. Now in the hands of the Prince’s Foundation, a charity Charles set up in 1986, Dumfries House is open to visitors and is also used for training young people in traditional skills and crafts.

CASTLE OF MEY
Est. Value: $15 M
Built in 1567 by George, the Earl of Caithness on the northeastern coast of Scotland, the Castle of Mey features a grand entrance and dining room designed by William Burn in 1819. It fell into disrepair in the 20th century until it was purchased by the Queen Elizabeth’s mother in 1952, who renovated the castle and its 30 acres of gardens and parklands and restored the property’s original name. The Queen Mother handed the castle over to a trust in 1996, which now forms part of The Prince’s Foundation.

Mass Trespass to protect AONB near Crawley, Sussex, Saturday 24 September 2022

Mass Trespass on Saturday September 24th, 10am – 3pm, Worth Forest, Sussex, organised by Landscapes of Freedom & Right to Roam.
Please note – this event was originally advertised for Sat 17 September but date was changed due to rail strike (which we of course support).
The next in the summer of trespasses, making the call for the Right to Roam louder, and echoing widely, whilst protesting Center Parcs’ gross plans for their next faux-forest holiday town. 900 lodges, car parks & roads to match, tropical (?!?) swimming pool, retail outlets, restaurants, infrastructure, habitat destruction on a grand scale dressed up as a family-favourite-forest-fun. In a forest…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65URCkmv_PU

Here’s our new 4.5 minute film ‘SAVE OLDHOUSE WARREN’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65URCkmv_PU

You don’t need to sign up on eventbrite, that’s just a tool. Email landscapesoffreedom@gmail.com & meet point will be announced a few days before.
For now, for advanced travel prep, aim for Balcombe station 9.30ish, where minibuses will be on hand. Other journeys are available…..
Wear forest finery if you choose! and any folk dancers or minstrels who fancy joining, please get in touch, most welcome.

Military Homes Re-Nationalisation Row Heads To Court

Military homes row heads to court

Guy Hands files legal claim against MoD to block renationalisation of £7.6bn housing portfolio

By Helen Cahill – Daily Telegraph – Tuesday 15 March 2022

GUY HANDS’ housing firm has launched legal proceedings against the Government to block the renationalisation of its portfolio of thousands of military homes.

Hands’ company Annington Homes has begun legal action in two courts after talks with the Ministry of Defence (MoD) over the renationalisation broke down. Annington offered to contribute £105m to maintain the homes but was rebuffed by the MoD.

Anningtorn has now launched a judicial review as well as a High Court claim challenging the ‘MoD’s plans. Defence chiefs are trying to use leasehold rights to reclaim homes that were first sold off by John Major’s administration in 1996.

Hands brokered the privatisation deal while he was head of the Principal Financial Group at Nomura. He later purchased the properties through his private equity firm Terra Firma. The portfolio is now valued at £7.6bn.

The MoD sold off 57,400 homes for £1.7bn and then rented them back on a 200-year lease.

The Government has since been criticised for failing to properly value the homes in the original auction. The National Audit Office has complained officials were too cautious with their assumptions for house prices, and missed out on vast capital growth in the portfolio. Its report found taxpayers have lost as much as £4.2bn.

The Government is also on the hook for hundreds of millions each year in rent and maintenance payments on the properties. Lord Admiral West, the former first sea lord, has described the deal as a “dream money-making scheme for the private sector”.

Annington said the Government could still avert a lengthy legal dispute if it takes up the company’s offer to contribute £105m towards maintenance. The company has warned legal proceedings could take up to five years.

A spokesman for Annington Homes said: “We can confirm that Annington has begun legal proceedings against the UK Government.

”We continue to be open to discuss with the Government to find a solution that avoids a long and expensive legal dispute.”

Hands was hoping to sell the portfolio in a private auction before hearing of the MOD’s attempt to reclaim the properties. Reports suggested he could have made more than £1.5bn from the sale.

The MoD has so far trialled its scheme on two individual properties. The so-called ‘enfranchisement’ scheme would allow the government to purchase freeholds en masse at a price agreed by a court.

Annington has argued that the scheme is not appropriate for use on a large number of homes and that making thousands of applications will block up the court system. But the MoD is confident it would be able to use test cases to establish valuations for a wider group of properties.

Mr Hands has embarked upon lengthy legal battles in the past. His ill-fated takeover of music group EMI sparked a legal dispute with Citigroup that lasted seven years. Citi lent Terra Firma £2.5bn to fund the deal.

Mr Hands later chased the bank through the courts, both in New York and London over allegations of fraud but he abandoned the £1.5bn case in 2016.

The MoD declined to comment.

The National Trust is trying to eliminate livestock farming by pushing tenants out for ‘pantheist’ rewilding projects

National Trust rewilding projects leave tenants feeling pushed out

https://www.fwi.co.uk/business/business-management/tenancies-rents/national-trust-rewilding-projects-leaves-tenants-feel-pushed-out

Several farming tenants and the Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) are concerned by what they see as the over-zealous way in which the National Trust is taking productive agricultural land back in-hand for rewilding.

Farmers Weekly talks to some tenants who have lost the land they have farmed for years.

See also: Why farm tenants are criticising National Trust landlords

Devon farmer leaves after 28 years

Patrick Greed, who farms on the Killerton Estate in Devon, feels he has betrayed agriculture after accepting an incentive from the National Trust to give up his Agricultural Holdings Act (AHA) tenancy after 28 years.

As well as the main 160ha holding he farmed, he had another 60ha of river meadow grazing on a Farm Business Tenancy (FBT).

The National Trust kept renewing it every five or 10 years, depending upon what environmental stewardship schemes we were in, he says.

Most recently, we had been in Higher Level Stewardship and once that ended, they decided to take it back for tree planting, scrapes and rewilding.

Loss of this land meant 61-year-old Mr Greed had to reduce his Limousin suckler herd. We had 550 head (cows and followers) before we lost the river meadows. Now we have 340.


Mr Greeds pedigree limousin Patrick Greed

With it becoming increasingly difficult to farm the land productively, alongside TB risks and greater public use of the land, Mr Greed accepted the incentive to quit and will leave the farm next year.

But he is uneasy about the direction the National Trust is taking.

It is not reletting it as a farm. It plans to do a lot of tree planting on the main holding. But just over 120ha of it is Grade 1 and 2 arable land.

It [the National Trust] even wants to plant trees on some of the permanent pasture. It is wrong. Farmers ought to be producing as much food as possible from this land.

Mr Greed is not alone. Land agent Kevin Bateman, director of Bateman Hosegood, has come across numerous cases, particularly in the past two years, where the National Trust has taken back tenanted land for rewilding and tree planting.

It feels like re-enactment of the Highland clearances a land grab, he says.

Typically, tenants are finding that their FBTs, which have been historically renewed, are being taken back in-hand, which is significantly affecting the viability of some businesses.

And some tenants with AHA tenancies are being offered cash incentives to give them up too, says Mr Bateman.

The policy feels like it is financially driven, with the trust targeting big grants for landscape-scale nature recovery at the expense of its tenanted farms.

It sees this as a way of creating significant income for itself. However, it does not understand the implications for the farming businesses and family homes that it is effectively destroying, he explains.

The way it is doing this suggests that it has complete contempt for the farmers who have farmed the land for generations.

Cornwall farmer feels destroyed

When Tom Hasson, 42, and his partner Becki Prouse, 37, took on the 220ha mixed farm FBT in Stowe Barton, Cornwall seven years ago having farmed 60-80ha of it for 14 years they fully expected to continue.


Tom Hasson and family Tom Hasson

When we took it on, the National Trust said it wanted to let it to a young farming family like us. In June last year, we went with a proposal to renew our Mid-Tier stewardship and tenancy, says Mr Hasson.

So it came as a bombshell when the trust said it had different plans for the premises. It wanted to take all the land back and create a nature reserve with agricultural production as a by-product rather than the main aim.

At their last meeting, the National Trust suggested running 50 head of cattle over 220ha on a year-to-year grazing licence.

But there would be no security and how could we get an income when they would be taking the payments? Our plans are up in the air, says Mr Hasson.

It has totally destroyed us and upset the kids. Ms Prouse agrees: There is no recognition of what we have done. I feel empty.

Devon farm goes to public access

Echoing this sentiment is Tim Jankins, who came out of his 180ha mixed farm FBT on the South Devon Estate, near Plymouth, in November last year.


Tim Jakins Moostones

We were there for 25 years. The National Trust approached us in 2018 when our tenancy was up for renewal and said we couldnt renew it on the previous terms, he says.

It wanted a large amount of public access, and to rewild some of it.

My gut reaction told me to get out. Id put a lifetimes savings into it and I didnt want to be there when it reverted back to whatever it was supposed to be reverting back to.

He has since heard that the farmhouse is empty and that there are many weeds on the farm. It is good, productive land, he adds.

We used to supply a good amount of beef and lamb, with grain going to local feed mills. This now has to be brought in from further away, which doesnt help the carbon footprint.

TFA: Wrong-headed policy

Tenant Farmers Association (TFA) chief executive George Dunn says that what is happening to some tenants is devastating.

They have put their heart and soul into a place, hoping to get some sort of tenancy renewal and are told this is not going to happen.

People are bringing up families on these farms, they are involved in local communities and go to local schools.

While he is aware of conversations on other National Trust estates, Mr Dunn says the situation is most potent in the South West, particularly affecting coastal properties.

The Trust is focusing attention on what it considers is needed for biodiversity net gain and carbon reduction. It doesnt see these farms as particularly important from an agricultural perspective.

The TFA thinks the policy is entirely wrong-headed. It is a vanity project driven by the current media frenzy around rewilding, which in our view is not based on sound science, says Mr Dunn.

The TFA is also challenging Defra over spending public money on such projects.

The governments objective is to maintain the landlord/tenant system in agriculture.

If a landlord like the National Trust decides to bring someones occupation of a farm to an end, it shouldnt have access to public funding for planting trees and rewilding, Mr Dunn suggests.

He advises tenants who have been approached about giving up their tenancy not to go quietly and to speak up for what they believe to be right.

Contact the TFA, he adds. We are building a database to help lobby the National Trust on a joint basis the more cases we have, the better.

National Trust insists it values its tenants

The National Trust says it wants to make its land better for nature, to help tackle the nature and climate crisis.

We want to create and restore 25,000ha for nature on our land by 2025 work started in 2017. This means we may retain land in-hand, often temporarily, to reset the management model, says a spokesman.

Any payments made as incentives to surrender tenancies are from National Trust funds, and each case is considered in its local context.

The trust denies taking land back so it can claim future Landscape Recovery or other environmental grants.

If we hold land in-hand, it is with a view to taking some time to plan its future use and management, the spokesman explains.

When we decide to make changes to our land, we look at the different options available to support any capital investments needed and to secure appropriate long-term management.

We anticipate future funding will come from a variety of sources and that rental income will continue to be part of that mix.

The National Trust says it is acutely aware of the impact on tenants when tenancies are not renewed. We work hard to support our tenants with the challenges they face as a result of this, it insists.

 

William Cobbett’s Dream Of A ‘Brave Old World’: Why Britain Needs A Peasants’ Revolt

If you leave England via the Severn bridge and drive through Wales’ Wye Valley, on a road parallel with the river, you will come to a settlement central to the history of these isles: Monmouth. I should warn you: it is a tad twee. It has an M&S Simply Food and a Waitrose. It’s that sort of small town. I should, also, declare my interest: one of my ancestors, a hardcase Welsh Borders esquire called John ap Harri, fought at Agincourt alongside Henry V, the warrior king who was born in Monmouth castle. So I confess to experiencing a small frisson of pride every time I go down Monmouth’s charming main (and almost only) street.

If, like the ap Harris and their descendants, you appreciate a ruck then — despite its genteel, beside-the-languid-Wye ambience — Monmouth is your kind of town. As well as the castle ruins, there is the Nelson Museum — the victor of the Nile and Trafalgar performed quite a lot of trysting with Emma Hamilton hereabouts. But my own personal place of “have-a-go” pilgrimage is the Wetherspoons situated (of course) on Agincourt Square.

I am an expert on that watering hole, The King’s Head, a rambling coaching inn dating from the 17th century, since I spent multitudinous hours under its stuccoed ceilings during the interval between collecting one child from Extra-Curricular Activity A at 5pm and waiting for the other to finish Extra-Curricular Activity B at 9pm. (We sometimes even spent the night in the pub, rather than do the 50-mile round trip home and back again to school in the morning. Country life, eh?) There are advantages to Wetherspoons, I find: their reputation as déclassé keeps out sanctimonious snobs. You are pretty safe from Emily Thornberry in a Wetherspoons.

I have digressed. The truest reason I love The King’s Head is that William Cobbett once gave a lecture there: an event commemorated by a nice print on the wall of the man — in red jacket, white britches and black boots, all properly Georgian — and a bit of accompanying biographical text.

The wall dedicated to William Cobbett in Monmouth’s Wetherspoon’s.

Cobbett was a scrapper on the same majestic scale as our Henry V and our Horatio, except he dished it out to Vested Interest rather than Jean-Pierre Foreigner. He is the faded star of the British Awkward Squad (Capt. Jon. Swift; Vice Capt. Geo. Orwell) and he needs a boost. He needs a blue plaque on every place he ever visited. In his long life — he was born in 1763 and died in 1835 — Cobbett was a farmer, Tory, soldier, Radical, MP, agony uncle (his books include Advice to Young Men), and the founder of Hansard.

His obituary in The Times, after categorising him as a “self-taught peasant”, declared Cobbett “by far the most voluminous writer that has ever lived for centuries”. The funniest, too: when some town council somewhere banned his anti-Malthusian play Surplus Population, he riposted with a drama entitled Bastards in High Places.

Above all, though, Cobbett was the champion of the rural poor, the village labourer and the small farmer. He was their one true tribune. He spoke at The King’s Head in 1820 because country folk were suffering a triple wham from agricultural depression, enclosure and the rise of agri-business. Or, to precis, “Hodge” (his name for the generic farm worker) was low-waged or unwaged and deprived of the bits of land he had once enjoyed under commoner’s rights.

Cobbett railed against “The Thing” (the capitalist, manufactory system) and the centrifugal, corrupting force of smoky London (“The Wen”, in Cobbettian). But he was no bloviator: he was a farm boy, and hence entirely empirical and properly pragmatic. He spent a decade travelling around the English sticks to discover the true state of affairs. His descriptions of his horseback journeys were published in 1830 as Rural Rides, the first sociological study of the English countryside.

No dry-as-dust tome by the way, the Rides: it brims with pinned-to-the-specimen-board descriptions of people and places, nature, wit. Cobbett knew beauty and, the proper Englishman that he was, he loved horses:

The finest sight in England is a stage coach ready to start. A great sheep or cattle fair is a beautiful sight; but in the stage coach you see more of what man is capable of performing. The vehicle itself, the harness, all so complete and so neatly arranged; so strong and clean and good. The beautiful horses, impatient to be off. The inside full and the outside covered, in every part with men, women, children, boxes, bags, bundles. The coachman taking his reins in hand and his whip in the other, gives a signal with his foot, and away go, at the rate of seven miles an hour.

One of these coaches coming in, after a long journey is a sight not less interesting. The horses are now all sweat and foam, the reek from their bodies ascending like a cloud. The whole equipage is covered perhaps with dust and dirt. But still, on it comes as steady as the hands on a clock.

Speaking at The King’s Head coaching inn in Monmouth must have been the dream gig for Cobbett the horseman.

When you go to that Wetherspoons yourself, take a copy of Rural Rides with you, sit under Cobbett’s portrait, and ask yourself the following question. Given all the Westminster-overlooked problems of British country people in 2020 — from the absence of public transport to abundance of second-homers — who speaks for us now? Where is our champion, our Cobbett? The one of us who can speak for us? Where?

Cobbett’s solution to the woes of the Regency rural poor was a return to a barter-based Medieval economy under gent paternalists with a sense of noblesse oblige, plus Parliamentary voting reform, creating a Britain where there would be “room for us all, and  plenty for us to eat and to drink”. In the bon mot of his biographer Richard Ingrams, Cobbett sought a “Brave Old World”.

Even in the 19thcentury, the call to go “back to the land” — vacating the towns and dismantling the factory system — was unrealisable nostalgia. But that is not to say that Cobbett’s proposals were meritless. One in particular needs dusting down today: self-sufficiency, as promoted in his manual and manifesto, Cottage Economy.

Of course — and I hear your sniggers — self-sufficiency has become a Tom-and-Barbara Good Life laugh, if a slightly strangled one now that, due to Covid “collapsology”, your neighbours are fleeing the Wen for a house with a large garden in Norfolk. If you truly believe self-sufficiency too quaint, ponder this: in France some 20% of the fresh produce consumed is still raised in the kitchen garden, the potager. Then ponder this also: during Covid, France’s newspapers declared “Potagers et jardins, les stars du confinement”. Well, obviously. Soul, stomach, sense of self-reliance, re-connection to healing nature all satisfied by a quarter of an acre. Every one of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” ticked. Voila!

Actually, self-sufficiency, autarchy, backyard farming — call it what you like — is a venerable British tradition. Once upon a time governments even sponsored self-sufficiency via Smallholdings Acts authorising acquisition of land for those wanting to grow their own. Between 1908 and 1914 alone, 205,103 acres were purchased in England and Wales for smallholders and allotmenteers. In return for service in the Great War, 24,000 soldiers were settled on plots in our green and pleasant land. The allotment movement was boosted by Round 2 with militaristic Germany, 1939-45, and the “Dig for Victory” campaign. By 1943 there were 1,400,000 allotments in the UK, producing a gob-smacking 1.3 million tonnes of food.

Then came the outbreak of peace, the population doubling to 60 million, and an expansion of housing which caused hard-pressed local authorities to sell land to developers. Currently, there are a niggardly 250,000 allotments in the UK, and the waiting lists are as long as rake handles. But now that BoJo has decided that money does, after all, grow on trees, why not spend a casual couple of billion purchasing land around Britain to be divided up into plots for village people and townspeople alike? (I propose this be called “The Cobbett Scheme”.)

So, when you are in Monmouth, do visit The King’s Head. Cobbett, the man who dined alike with Pitt and farmworker, who hated cruelty to animals, and appreciated a good pint, would have been entirely at home in a Wetherspoons —with their CAMRA ale, RSPCA Freedom Food eggs, Marine Stewardship Council fish (I have eaten in Michelin starred restaurants with less ethical food and drinks policies) and its merciful absence of stuffed shirts.And, alongside Rural Rides, have Cottage Economy with you, and ask yourself this ultimate question: do we not need more self-sufficiency in this country?

I say we do. As the Sex Pistols should have sung: “Autarchy for the UK!”

How Manchester sold itself to Abu Dhabi’s elite – for a song

How a great English city sold itself to Abu Dhabi’s elite – and not even for a good price

Manchester’s Labour council let Sheikh Mansour buy up acres of public land for seemingly a fraction of its worth – how was this allowed?

Aditya Chakrabortty – The Guardian – Thu 21 Jul 2022

London is one giant pantomime this summer. Just look to the politicians and journalists, hot-breathed with excitement, horse-trading and haggling over who gets to be the Tories’ next head prefect. But if you want the truth about how power and money operate in the UK today then ditch Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, and head to Manchester. Yes, Manchester: the comeback city that traded cotton mills for skyscrapers, and is now cheered by the Financial Times and George Osborne. The metropolis that taught the world so much about industrial capitalism 200 years ago now offers another harsh lesson about its 21st-century, financialised version.

Go a few minutes east of the city centre, and walk from New Islington into Ancoats. Block follows block of newly built and freshly converted flats and houses, many lining a lovely marina that glistens in the July sun. You can rent or buy these places right now, as long as you don’t mind how much some look like pile-em-high student boxes and that they all cost a packet. This is what post-industrial regeneration looks like, right? Redbrick in tooth and claw. But note something: almost 1,500 of these homes come from just one developer, and in that lies an entire sobering story.

Launched in 2014, Manchester Life was hailed as a “£1bn deal” between the city council and the Abu Dhabi-based owner of Manchester City football club. The local authority had swaths of brownfield and Sheikh Mansour, the club’s owner, ranked among the richest men on the planet. Working together, the result would be homes for people who desperately needed them and pots of cash. The council’s then leader, Richard Leese, promised “a world-class exemplar of regeneration”.

Meanwhile, human rights groups warned Manchester council about its powerful new business partner. The Abu Dhabi United Group investment fund is formally separate from the kingdom, but its owner, Sheikh Mansour, is the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and brother of Abu Dhabi’s ruling crown prince. In April, journalists at Der Spiegel magazine published documents suggesting that the state of Abu Dhabi had facilitated payments to Manchester City. At the very least, the investment fund is closely linked to what Amnesty International has described as “one of the most brutal police states in the Middle East”. To dissent in the UAE is to rot in jail, in a regime with proportionately more political prisoners than anywhere else in the world. Low-paid migrant nannies or builders are, Human Rights Watch says, “forced labour”. Yet such facts did not deter the council’s Labour leadership from going ahead.

It was a huge advance for Sheikh Mansour who had, only half a decade earlier in 2008, bought a struggling football club. Now his investment fund was entering a joint venture with the British state (albeit at local level), getting its hands on prime real estate and shaping the city’s very geography. Those of Vladimir Putin’s oligarchs who trousered chunks of London could never dream of such a glittering prize.

As one of the rulers of an autocratic kingdom that has an appalling reputation for repression and an addiction to oil revenues, Sheikh Mansour stood to gain so much from this partnership. It was the council that held almost all the cards: the hectares of publicly owned land, the planning regime, the public subsidies. Yet somehow, according to new research shared exclusively today with the Guardian and authored by academics at Sheffield University, it was Sheikh Mansour who pocketed almost all the winnings. The report says that nine sites were sold to the sheikh at a fraction of their value, and well below what other plots nearby fetched (the council says it used independent experts using standard valuations, although it won’t give any more details). They were on leases lasting 999 years, well beyond the norm. And the fund shifted what had been public assets to companies registered in Jersey.

That walk along the water from New Islington into Ancoats now passes blocks of privatised land owned in an offshore tax haven, which yields millions upon millions for a key member of the wealthy elite running a surveillance state halfway across the globe. One of the greatest cities in the world has sold itself to a senior figure in a brutal autocracy – and not even for a good price.

This is the devastating implication in the first thorough study of the Manchester Life scheme, which is a product of months poring over company accounts and planning applications. The city council is sometimes keener to criticise its critics than to hear what they have to say: Leese, its leader for 25 years until 2021, once responded to those calling for more affordable housing as “middle class tosspots and I hate them”. So let us knock on the head any personal attacks: the experts have all lived in the city for decades, I am one of the independent and unpaid advisers on the advisory panel, and this is a report issued squarely in the public interest.

Among a political establishment still scratching its head over how to level up, Manchester is celebrated as a pioneer. Its Labour leadership has been praised by Conservative administrations, while Osborne called its chief executive, Sir Howard Bernstein, “the star of British local government”.

Bernstein ran the council for nearly two decades until 2017, and sat on the board of Manchester Life. Yet its success has come at a high price for the little people who just happen to live in the city. Not only have the assets they owned been sold cheap, they have got little back. The nine developed sites have no social or affordable housing, which the council’s planning officers justified with statements such as: “There is already a high level of affordable housing in the immediate area.” The same council admitted earlier this year that nearly 4,000 of the city’s children sleep each night in temporary accommodation.

At the Manchester Life developments, a two-bed flat is considered a bargain if it goes for £369,000 – a price that puts it off limits to couples working full-time on an average salary. As for tax, the sums paid to the Exchequer seem risible. One of its main subsidiaries earned more than £26m in the five years to 2021, but, the researchers found, paid less than £10,000 in tax – an effective rate of just 4p on each £100 of revenue. Manchester Life told me that its subsidiaries “pay all UK corporation or income tax due on rental income and profits”. It would not, however, disclose how much tax it pays or on how much revenue.

It is right to say that New Islington and Ancoats are vastly more pleasant areas than they were even five years ago – but the big question is who has won from redevelopment and who has lost. Putting hard numbers on that is tricky when so much of the information about Manchester Life – a venture using public assets and public subsidy with a public authority – is kept strictly private.

I asked the report’s authors to calculate how much the council could have earned from this deal. Looking at examples of other land deals and other local councils, their conservative estimate is £33m, plus up to £1.7m a year in rent. Both the council and the joint venture described that sum as “speculative”. The council also said it expected more money to come through an overage or profit-share arrangement, although it did not provide any details of this agreement nor are they on public record. But for comparison, that £33m would more than cover what the city pays in a year to put up families in temporary housing.

Sheikh Mansour will presumably know exactly how much Manchester Life is netting him – and can look forward to 10 centuries of rental income from the land in this great city. He seems content with the arrangement. A few months after Bernstein retired from the council, he was appointed as the senior strategic adviser for City Football Group, owned by Sheikh Mansour. I asked the council what procedures it followed on Bernstein’s subsequent appointment with such an important business partner. It could not tell me.

Perhaps the nicest of the Manchester Life developments is Murrays’ Mill, a conversion of one of the world’s first steam-powered cotton mills into flats. It stands in the heart of Ancoats, alongside Bengal Street. My family is originally from Bengal, a region that once wove the best textiles in the world, muslins so fine that the French sighed over their perfection. It was the East India Company’s entry point into the riches of south Asia.

To look at such names carved on to brick is to remember how Manchester came to its industrial wealth and Britain to global pre-eminence, from cotton picked by enslaved people and through destroying foreign industrial competition, even criminalising the sale of Indian textiles. But today it symbolises something else: a country celebrating its receipt of capital from other states under the shabbiest of terms as a triumph. The difference is that Indians were under no illusions about what had befallen them.

Bill Gates Buying Farmland, Welcome To Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill

Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr

Global Research, July 01, 2021

Theme: Biotechnology and GMO, Intelligence, Poverty & Social Inequality

Manufactured Collapse: The attack on us all continues via small farmers and farms:
FARMERS ACROSS EUROPE PROTEST IN SOLIDARITY WITH DUTCH FARMERS AS FAKE GREEN AGENDA TAKES AWAY THE FARMS
Published July 8, 2022
DUTCH FARMERS SPRAY MANURE ON GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS IN PROTEST
Published July 7, 2022
How the ‘Green’ EU is starving the world
Published July 5, 2022

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/07/how-the-green-eu-starves-the-world/

First published on February 5, 2021

Bill Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

“Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself, an appetite that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses.” — Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, presiding judge in the Gates/Microsoft antitrust-fraud case

The global lockdowns that Bill Gates helped orchestrate and cheerlead have bankrupted more than 100,000 businesses in the U.S. alone and plunged a billion people into poverty and deadly food insecurity that, among other devastating harms, kill 10,000 African children monthly — while increasing Gates’ wealth by $20 billion. His $133 billion fortune makes him the world’s fourth wealthiest man.

Gates has been using that newfound cash to expand his power over global populations by buying devalued assets at fire-sale prices and maneuvering for monopoly control over public health, privatizing prisons, online education and global communications while promoting digital currencies, high tech surveillance, data harvesting systems and artificial intelligence.

For a man obsessed with monopoly control, the opportunity to also dominate food production must seem irresistible.

According to the newest issue of The Land Report, Gates has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States. Gates’ portfolio now comprises about 242,000 acres of American farmland and nearly 27,000 acres of other land across Louisiana, Arkansas, Nebraska, Arizona, Florida, Washington and 18 other states.

Thomas Jefferson believed that the success of America’s exemplary struggle to supplant the yoke of European feudalism with a noble experiment in self-governance depended on the perpetual control of the nation’s land base by tens of thousands of independent farmers, each with a stake in our democracy.

So at best, Gates’ campaign to scarf up America’s agricultural real estate is a signal that feudalism may again be in vogue. At worst, his buying spree is a harbinger of something far more alarming — the control of global food supplies by a power-hungry megalomaniac with a Napoleon complex.

Let’s explore the context of Gates’ stealth purchases as part of his long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally.

Beginning in 1994, Gates launched an international biopiracy campaign to achieve vertically integrated dominion over global agricultural production. His empire now includes vast agricultural lands and hefty investments in GMO crops, seed patents, synthetic foods, artificial intelligence including robotic farm workers, and commanding positions in food behemoths including Coca-Cola, Unilever, Philip Morris (Kraft, General Foods), Kellogg’s, Procter & Gamble and Amazon (Whole Foods), and in multinationals like Monsanto and Bayer that market chemical pesticides and petrochemical fertilizers.

As usual, Gates coordinates these personal investments with taxpayer-subsidized grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the richest and most powerful organization in all of international aid, his financial partnerships with Big Ag, Big Chemical, and Big Food, and his control of international agencies — including some of his own creation — with awesome power to create captive markets for his products.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a protégé and partner to David Rockefeller, observed that, “Who controls the food supply controls the people.” In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations launched the $424 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) promising to double crop productivity and boost incomes for 30 million small farmers by 2020 while cutting food insecurity in half.

Characteristically, Gates’ approach to global problems put technology and his chemical, pharmaceutical and oil industry partners at the center of every solution. As it turned out, Gates’ “innovative strategy” for food production was to force America’s failed system of GMO, chemical and fossil fuel-based agriculture on poor African farmers.

African agricultural practices have evolved from the land over 10,000 years in forms that promote crop diversity, decentralization, sustainability, private property, self-organization and local control of seeds. The personal freedom inherent in these localized systems leaves farm families making their own decisions: the masters on their lands, the sovereigns of their destinies. Continuous innovation by millions of small farmers maximized sustainable yields and biodiversity.

In his ruthless reinvention of colonialism, Gates spent $4.9 billion dollars to dismantle this ancient system and replace it with high-tech corporatized and industrialized agriculture, chemically dependent monocultures, extreme centralization and top-down control. He forced small African farms to transition to imported commercial seeds, petroleum fertilizers and pesticides.

Gates built the supply chain infrastructure for chemicals and seeds and pressured African governments to spend huge sums on subsidies and to use draconian penalties and authoritarian control to force farmers to buy his expensive inputs and comply with his diktats. Gates made farmers replace traditional nutritious subsistence crops like sorghum, millet, sweet potato and cassava with high-yield industrial cash crops, like soy and corn, which benefit elite commodity traders but leave poor Africans with little to eat. Both nutrition and productivity plummeted. Soils grew more acidic with every application of petrochemical fertilizers.

As with Gates’ African vaccine enterprise, there was neither internal evaluation nor public accountability. The 2020 study “False Promises: The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)” is the report card on the Gates’ cartel’s 14-year effort. The investigation concludes that the number of Africans suffering extreme hunger has increased by 30 percent in the 18 countries that Gates targeted. Rural poverty has metastasized dramatically, and the number of hungry people in these nations has risen to 131 million.

Under Gates’ plantation system, Africa’s rural populations have become slaves on their own land to a tyrannical serfdom of high-tech inputs, mechanization, rigid schedules, burdensome conditionalities, credits and subsidies that are the defining features of Bill Gates’ “Green Revolution.”

The only entities benefiting from Gates’ program are his international corporate partners — and particularly Monsanto, in which the Gates Foundation Trust purchased 500,000 shares worth $23 million in 2010 (but later divested those shares after pressure from civil society groups). Gates himself even filmed commercials for Monsanto’s GMOs, touting them as the “solution” to world hunger.

In a typical example of Gates’ strange largess, his foundation apparently made his taxpayer-subsidized “charitable” grants amounting to $10 million to the Big Ag behemoth, Cargill, to build his supply chains for GMO soy in South Africa. Africans call Gates’ program “Neocolonialism” or “Corporate Colonialism.”

The AGRA Watch initiative of Seattle-based Community Alliance for Global Justice follows Gates’ agricultural and food policies. According to Heather Day, an AGRA Watch spokesperson, AGRA is a trojan horse for corporate kleptocracy.

“The Gates Foundation and AGRA claim to be ‘pro-farmer,’ ‘pro-poor’ and ‘pro-environment,’” Day told me. “But their approach is closely aligned with transnational corporations, like Monsanto, and foreign policy actors like USAID [United States Agency for International Development]. They take advantage of food and global climate crises to promote high-tech, centralized, industrial agriculture that generate profits for Gates’ corporate partners while degrading the environment and disempowering farmers. Their programs are a dark form of philanthrocapitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”

Gates’ climate activism (A memo to my environmental colleagues)

To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.” These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control.

It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery. In my 40 years as a climate activist, I saw zero evidence of Gates’ funding of genuine climate advocacy; the Gates Foundation is AWOL in the climate wars.

The leading climate groups, National Resource Defense Council, Environmental Defense Fund, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Waterkeepers, etc., receive virtually nothing from the world’s largest philanthropy. His investment history suggests that the climate crisis, for Gates and his cronies, is no more than an alibi for intrusive social control, “Great Reset”-scale surveillance, and massive science fiction geoengineering boondoggles, including his demented and terrifying vanity projects to spray the stratosphere with calcium chloride or seawater to slow warming, to deploy giant balloons to saturate our atmosphere with reflective particles to blot out the sun, or his perilous gambit of releasing millions of genetically modified mosquitoes in South Florida.

When we place these nightmare schemes in context alongside the battery of experimental vaccines he forces on 161 million African children annually, it’s pretty clear that Gates regards us all as his lab rats.

Gates has also heeded Kissinger’s advice, “Control oil and you control nations;” his energy holdings nowhere reflect his expressed antipathy for greenhouse gases. Gates’ personal investments in hydrocarbons include massive stakes in all the oil majors: Exxon, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and Shell. He owns the world’s largest private jet company. His outsized commitment to coal includes giant investments in the dirtiest coal-generating fleets including the Canadian National Railway and CSX Richmond which is the largest coal transporter east of the Mississippi River. Gates is betting big on the future of carbon.

Gates’ energy-hungry data harvesting, processing and analytics centers are among the world’s fastest-growing sources of exploding energy demand. And, of course, Gates’ chemical/industrial agriculture enterprises are the antithesis of climate-friendly. His GMO corn requires heavy applications of fertilizers, pesticides, agro-chemicals made from natural gas and other fossil-fuel inputs. He effectively forced Africans, in Michael Pollan’s words, to “eat oil.” African farmers call Gates’ program “climate-stupid agriculture.

Gates has learned to fatten himself on global crises, whether it’s pandemics, climate, famine or mass extinction. Climate change has given Gates an excuse to create monopolies over seed, food and agriculture.

In 2008, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced $306 million in grants to promote high-yield sustainable agriculture among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The foundation’s plans included creation, through genetic manipulation, of high-production, drought-resistant dairy cows, and the development and proliferation of super crops resistant to climate change.

In other words, climate change was the guise for more mischievous geoengineering. Meanwhile, Gates’ ag policies are destroying our planet’s climate systems, pushing millions of species to extinction, desertifying the soil, destroying water systems and enriching the Poison Cartel.

So, a note to my fellow environmental leaders: Bill Gates is not our amigo! Furthermore, Gates has put climate reform in malodour with millions of Americans, who see his climate pretenses in context of his ambitions to control humanity and put an end to economic activity and personal freedom.

It’s largely Gates’ doing that half of America sees climate change as either a “Great Reset” flimflam to shift wealth upward, or a geoengineering boondoggle. It’s on them that they don’t recognize the serious peril of climate change. It’s on us that we seem deliberately blinded to the peril of Bill Gates.

Gates profits from all this confusion; the polarization of the climate debate paralyzes reform efforts thereby preserving the value of his carbon stakes. We all need to recognize who is really behind that Green mask!

Biopiracy

“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s letter to all state governors, February 1937

Long experience and research have shown that agroecology based on biodiversity, Seed Freedom and Food Freedom is essential not just to civil liberties and democracy, but to the future of food and farming.

For thousands of years, farmers’ innovation and biodiversity evolved together to create the most efficient practices for sustainable food production and biodiversity. The United Nations’ seminal 2009 study by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) documents the incontrovertible evidence demonstrating the abject failure of the Gates/Rockefeller “Green Revolution” to improve on traditional agriculture.

IAASTD deployed a team of 900 leading scientists, agronomists, and researchers to study the issue of world hunger. Their comprehensive and definitive report showed that GMO crops are not the answer to food shortfalls or rural poverty. That report definitively concludes that neither Gates’ Green Revolution nor his GMOs can feed the world and at the same time protect the planet.

IAASTD’s comprehensive analysis demonstrates that the Green Revolution that the Rockefeller Foundation launched in India and Mexico in the 1960s was a catastrophe; the chemical path of monocultures has undermined Earth’s capacity to support life and food production by destroying biodiversity, soil and water, as well as contributing to climate change.

Green Revolution policies subvert food and nutritional security, and dispossess small farmers through debt for external inputs. IAASTD and numerous other studies show that Seed Sovereignty, Food Sovereignty and Knowledge Sovereignty are the only viable future for food and farming. The United Nations and the world’s top agricultural scientists have admitted that GMOs cannot fight hunger as effectively as traditional farming.

Bill Gates has opted to ignore this reality, dismissing science-based evidence in favor of his messianic faith that he is ordained by God to save the world with technology. According to Dr. Gates, M.D., good health only comes in a syringe (he is the world’s biggest vaccine producer).

Likewise, Farmer Bill preaches that good food only comes from monocultures, chemical pesticides and fertilizers, GMO crops and patented seeds that he happens to own. In constructing his agriculture empire, Gates has repeatedly shown himself willing to ignore the voices of scientists and farmers, and to trample laws, treaties, traditions, civil rights, science, and sensibilities.

Stealing seeds

Since the onset of the Neolithic Revolution some 10,000 years ago, farmers and communities have worked to improve yield, taste, nutrition, robust seed qualities that enhance peculiar growth, medicinal and nutritional attributes, and the genetic resilience that allows certain seeds to flourish in particular soil and water conditions or resist predators.

These vigorous, ingenious genetics are the products of a miraculous collaboration between humans, nature and their Creator during humanity’s 1,000 generations of intense agricultural innovation. The free exchange of knowledge and seeds among farmers has been the basis for maintaining biodiversity and food security.

Since 1979, under World Bank auspices, a consortium of agricultural research centers known as the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has been collecting these premier seeds from small farmers across the globe and preserving them in 15 independent Public Seed Banks stationed in different countries. That venture sought to archive a complete inventory of heritage seed stocks for the benefit of all humanity so as to preserve crop diversity for the millennia.

In the last 17 years, Gates has successfully maneuvered to gain control of those collections — comprising 768,578 seeds — and to assert monopoly ownership of the world’s premier seed inventories.

Beginning in 2003, working in coordination with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pumped $720 million into CGIAR’s Seed Bank project. As the largest funder of the CGIAR, Gates used his financial leverage to force the merger of the CGIAR’s 15 legally independent centers into one legal entity, a sinister initiative that he calls “Gates Ag One.” He then moved to orchestrate the transfer of research and seeds from scientific research institutions to commodity-based corporations like Bayer and Cargill with which he partners. In this way he is raiding, plundering and privatizing the seed stockpile for the most promising seeds from indigenous farmers around the world.

Gates Ag One’s director, Joe Cornelius, is a former executive at Bayer Crop Science. Prior to that, he was Monsanto’s Director of International Development. Working with Cornelius, Gates has perfected the techniques Monsanto pioneered in the 1980s when it led the push to propagate GMOs, and to patent seeds. Gates has made himself the Commanding General in Big Data’s pirate war to plunder and monopolize the common genomic data of millions of plants bred by peasants over the millennia.

Gates funds Diversity Seek (DivSeek), a global project he launched in 2015 to map the genomes and genome sequences of the peasant seed stocks held in seed banks. DivSeek and Gates Ag One are the tips of his spears, “mining” seed data to “censor” out the commons. In other words — to terminate the public’s ownership claims.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies, Gates’ minions at DivSeek and Gates AG One scan these seeds and categorize their genetic data to map, patent and pilfer humanity’s global seedstock heritage. Gates bolsters his patent rationale by using CRISPR technology to selectively edit the heritage seed genomes, making changes sufficient to withstand patent challenges.

Gates’ principal objective is to breed Green Revolution varieties engineered to respond to chemical inputs produced by Gates’ “Poison Cartel” partners: Monsanto, Bayer, Dow/DuPont, CropLife, BASF, Syngenta, Corteva, etc. In short, Gates deliberately robs the seed of its integrity and diversity, erasing evolutionary history and its links to the soil, reducing it all to a simple “code.” In this way, Gates captures our planet’s genetic diversity, rewrites it, patents its code, steals the seeds from humanity and marries them off to the chemical conglomerates.

Food, Dependency and Dispossession. “Corporate Consolidation of the Entire Global Agri-food Chain”

By centralizing the Seed Banks and manipulating intellectual property laws, Gates has launched a campaign of “genetic colonialism” to rob the world’s peasants and indigenous farmers of their hard-earned seeds and knowledge.

“Gates Ag One’s aim is to take control over the genetic diversity of this planet,” agricultural freedom activist Dr. Vandana Shiva told me. According to Shiva, Gates “continues to subvert and sabotage both farmers’ seed sovereignty and the seed sovereignty of countries. ‘Gates Ag One’ is a clear declaration of his intent to create an empire over life and biodiversity, over food and farming, and over our sustenance.” In the process, says Shiva, “Gates is financing infernal Frankenstein experiments that defile God’s creation.”

Citizens, governments and farm organizations have written many laws and governments have adopted international treaties on biodiversity protection, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol to the CBD. By conning government officials, manipulating intellectual property law and rewriting seed regulations, Gates has been able to bypass or trample these statutes and treaties, and to evade the multilateral governance structures that governments put in place to prevent global corporations from hijacking the planet’s biodiversity and the seed commonwealth of peasants and farmers.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs)

Gates’ missionary faith in technology as the solution for every human ill, from food insecurity and disease to climate health, explains his obsessive promotion of GMOs. Gates’ zealous GMOs idolatry and gene-editing technologies leave him deaf to the mountains of peer-reviewed scientific evidence and warnings by agronomists, nutritionists, toxicologists and other scientists who question their safety.

GMO vaccines and medicines are mainstays of his public health enterprise, and Gates finances research, development and proliferation of GMOs as the fix for every agricultural problem. He funded, for example, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, the two CRISPR chemists who won 2020 Nobel prizes for gene editing.

Gates was also one of the largest shareholders of Monsanto — the world’s most aggressive promoter of GMOs and pesticides. The central mission of Gates Ag One is to fly into the face of virtually every independent science and safety assessment in a blind rush to impose Gates’ untested GMOs, patented seeds, synthetic foods and experimental medicines on humanity.

One might expect his Monsanto stake and his partnerships with processed food, chemical and oil companies to discredit Gates’ pretensions as a public health advocate. But Gates’ massive investments in media journalism (a March 2020 Nation magazine exposé reveals the Gates Foundation has bought Gates guarantees of favorable coverage with $250 million in grants to media outlets including NBC/Universal, BBC, NPR, The Guardian, Le Mond, Al Jazeera, and others “to influence the news”) have insulated him from the scrutiny and skepticism the media historically applied to fiendish profiteering schemes and rank hypocrisy by power-mad billionaires.

Money talks, and the billions that Gates and his pharma allies annually pour into public and commercial journalism have instead made Gates the media’s chief darling. He uses his biweekly “satellite tours” of leading cable and network news shows to showcase his mesmerizing power to command softball questioning and fawning deference from obsequious hosts (with the exception of Norah O’Donnell) including Anderson Cooper (CNN), David Muir (ABC), Ari Melber (MSNBC), and Chuck Todd (NBC), who gratefully entertain his lofty prognostication on topics ranging from public health to the economy and agriculture policy.

Evading government regulation

Gates’ wealth and power also allow him to evade government efforts to regulate GMO proliferation. In 2011, when India introduced a moratorium on Gates’ genetically modified Bt Cotton and Roundup Ready crops, Gates shifted his operations to Bangladesh. When the European Court of Justice ruled that gene-edited organisms and GMOs must be heavily regulated to protect public health, Gates launched a lobbying campaign for deregulation across the European community.

Gates is currently deploying his billions to orchestrate attacks against GMO and gene editing laws in many of the countries that have imposed safety standards. When scientists and regulators plead that time is essential to accurately assess the safety of gene editing and GMOs, Gates declares that “Time is the enemy!”

In 2017, a German human rights group, Heinrich Böll Stiftung (HBS), published evidence of a Gates’ secretive campaign to evade democratically imposed restraints on his high-risk gene manipulation experiments. HBS released more than 1,200 emails the group obtained under U.S. Freedom of Information laws. Those documents show that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation hired a shady Big Ag/Biotech spy and propaganda outfit to mount an undercover espionage attack aimed at corrupting United Nations officials and sabotaging international efforts to ban a diabolical new technology called “gene drive.”

Gene drives are at the cutting edge of genetic engineering, synthetic biology and gene editing. They are the tools of choice for eugenicists and for those seeking to build the technocratic “transhuman future” championed by Gates and his Silicon Valley cronies.

Scientists use CRISPR technology to edit genes into an organism’s chromosomes to reprogram DNA to switch off the normal rules of genetic inheritance and “drive” the artificially introduced trait through an entire population and spread it to all future generations. Their capacity to permanently alter the genome of an entire species makes gene drives the biological instrument of ultimate power.

Gene-editing technology could facilitate Gates’ schemes to create and patent new-and-improved species of plants and animals, or to exterminate species of which he disapproves. One of his aims is to use gene drives to insert “suicide genes” to eradicate entire mosquito species that spread Zika or malaria — a goal of the Target Malaria Project, in which the Gates Foundation has invested$40 million. Dr. Anthony Fauci, a long-time protégé and partner of Gates and an enthusiastic cheerleader for gene drive, told StatNews, “Getting rid of them would be a blessing.”

Critics argue that gene drives pose an existential biosecurity risk to humanity due to their capacity to change or eliminate entire species and to catastrophically alter ecosystems. They are, also, the ultimate biological weapon; the most satanic minds in various military and intelligence agencies covet gene drives to breed supersoldiers or to mint “apocalypse genes.” Critics fear that nations might one day use “genocide genes” to eradicate certain races or undesirable traits.

HBS’s Gene Drive Files expose the leading role of the U.S. military in the development of gene drive technology. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has spent approximately $100 million researching gene drives. The other primary Gene Drive investors are Dr. Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has invested $75 million in researching suicide and anti-fertility genes.

At the 2016 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 13) in Cancun, 179 international organizations, including the Heinrich Böll Foundation, voted for the UN to impose a global moratorium on gene drives. The opponents of this technology also circulated a letter, “A Call for Conservation with a Conscience: No Place for Gene Drives in Conservation.” Environmentalists worry about unintended consequences if suicide or extinction genes leap species.

The Gene Drive emails reveal that in reaction to the COP 13 resolution, the Gates Foundation hired “Emerging Ag,” a sketchy espionage concern with its own sinister entanglements with Big Pharma and Big Ag, to sabotage and shut down the diverse and unified international coalition opposing gene drive.

The Gates Foundation gave Emerging Ag $1.6 million to “recruit a covert coalition of academics to manipulate the UN decision-making process over gene drives.” The emails reveal that the Gates’ campaign was part of the billionaire’s plan to “fight back against gene drive moratorium proponents.” Emerging Ag secretly mobilized some 65 allegedly “independent scientists” for hire — “Biostitutes,” in the industry vernacular — and public officials to an online expert group, the UN CBD Online Forum on Synthetic Biology. A senior executive of the Gates Foundation provided these crooked operatives with daily instructions on how to sabotage regulations, undermine the science, discredit advocates, corrupt the process, and subvert democracy.

In furtherance of its campaign, Gates simultaneously funded a 2016 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences endorsing gene driving. The DARPA co-funded the whitewash report with the Gates Foundation. As The Guardian noted after the release of the NAS report:

“The same US defense research agency (DARPA) who paid for the NAS study have made it known that they are going all-in on gene drive research and development of ‘robust’ synthetic organisms. There is good reason to be worried.”

As Jim Thomas of the ETC Group observed: “The fact that gene drive development is now being primarily funded and structured by the US military raises alarming questions about this entire field.”

In furtherance of its coordinated campaign with Emerging Ag, the Gates Foundation manipulated three members, who were under Gates’ control, of the relevant UN expert committee known as AHTEG (Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group) on Synthetic Biology. Gates and Emerging Ag were successful and the UN shot down the moratorium.

The Gates Foundation’s role, exposed by the Gene Drives files, in subverting the environmental movement’s campaign against this dangerous technology confirms Gates and his foundation as a rogue outlaw cartel with contempt for process, for democracy, for science, law, public opinion, public health and the safety of humanity.

Chemical warfare on human health

Mounting evidence points to the kind of industrially grown and processed foods that Gates favors as leading culprits in the chronic disease epidemics that are devastating human health and debilitating children across the globe.

The world’s most popular GMOs function to facilitate aerial spraying of pesticides. Monsanto’s technique of inserting genes to make agricultural crops resistant to weed-killing poisons allows Big Ag to fire ground-based farm workers, replacing them with airplanes (or drones) that saturate landscapes (and food) with aerosolized toxins like glyphosate and neonicotinoids.

Since the proliferation of chemical pesticides in the 1940s, more than half of American songbirds have disappeared, most of the world’s bee and insect populations have collapsed and chronic disease rates in America have risen to 54% in lockstep with increased pesticide use.

As Vandana Shiva pointed out, “Gates has declared chemical warfare not just on nature but on our body’s metabolic systems and the symbiosis in the gut microbiome with his pesticides and herbicides obsession, and his campaign to switch humanity to GMOs.”

Synthetic foods: soylent ‘Gates’

“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.” — CIA propagandist Bertrand Russell, an advocate of one world government, dictatorship, and top-down control of the masses by a privileged oligarchal class (1952).

Gates’ power, profit and control agenda appears to drive his commitment to synthesize so-called “transhuman” laboratory foods and his massive investments in processed food manufacturing.

Gates calls synthetic meat “the future of food.” He holds investments in companies that make plant-based chicken, eggs and others that make food from bugs. Gates owns patents or has patents pending for over 100 animal proxies, from chicken to fish. He is invested heavily in Motif FoodWorks, a company that makes a variety of synthesized laboratory foods and ingredients. He co-founded Breakthrough Energy in 2015 with his billionaire buddies Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg — the so-called “Pandemic Profiteers Club.” (U.S. billionaires have increased their wealth by $1.1 trillion since the lockdown began, while the number of impoverished Americans grew by 8 million.)

That collaboration has large stakes in Beyond Meat, which they co-own with Tyson Foods and Cargill. Beyond Meat makes plant-based GMO and pesticide-laden chicken tacos. Gates and his Billionaire Boys Club also have big positions in Impossible Foods, which uses heat and pressure to produce synthetic burgers and bratwurst from GMO soy. Lab results show the company’s imitation meat contained glyphosate levels 11 times higher than its closest competitor. Seth Itzkan from Soil4Climate wrote:

“Impossible Foods should really be called ‘Impossible Patents.’ It’s not food; it’s software, intellectual property — 14 patents, in fact, in each bite of Impossible Burger. It’s IFood, the next killer app. Just download your flavor. This is its likely appeal to Bill Gates, their über investor.”

Another of Breakthrough’s ventures is Memphis Meats, which formulates an engineered meat-like tissue on a substrate of calf’s blood. A bullish Bloomberg predicts that synthetic meat revenues will reach $3.5 billion by 2026.

In June 2020, the “Breakthrough Bros” invested $3.5 million in Biomilq, a company that produces synthetic breast milk from “cultured human mammary glands and epithelial cells.” Gates has not explained whether the milk will contain the maternal antibodies — present in authentic mother’s milk — that function to protect infants from infectious diseases, or whether the coming generations of Biomilq kids will need to rely, instead, on additional batteries of Gates’ GMO vaccines.

Unimpressed, Vandana Shiva observes that Bill Gates “wants to deprive us of good, healthy proteins and fats and get us hooked on his synthetic lab-grown trash.”

Gates is the creator and largest donor to the United Nations’ subsidiary, GAVI, a faux governmental agency that he created to push his diabolical chemical, medical and food concoctions, and conduct villainous vaccine experiments on Africans and Indians. Since 2014, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, funded by the Gates Foundation in the amount of almost $850K has aggressively pushed the use of insect protein — particularly for the poor. GAVI characterizes wasps, beetles, crickets and other insects as “underutilized” food sources.

Following Gates’ lead, GAVI is optimistic that bugs will soon be an important food supplement for impoverished and undernourished children.

Perhaps in anticipation of that happy day, the Gates Foundation has invested in a South African company that makes edible protein from cultivated maggots. The company’s factory houses a billion flies and produces 22 tons of maggots daily that graze on slaughterhouse, municipal and household waste. Since markets are still immature for maggots as human food, Gates sells his maggot-meal to factory meat operations like those owned by Gates’ partner, Tyson Foods, to feed battery-caged chickens, and to large-scale fish farms, like those owned by Unilever, a $58 billion multinational, which is both a business partner to Gates and a grant beneficiary of his peculiar public charity.

As usual, Gates has also mobilized the international agencies that he controls and the large corporations with which he partners to drive his fake food agenda including, most notably, The Gates-funded World Economic Forum (WEF), which assembles the world’s billionaires in Davos each year to plan and plot out humanity’s political and economic future.

WEF’s Chairman, Klaus Schwab, is the author of the influential book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset”, which WEF has apparently mailed to most of the world’s elected officials, down to provincial executives.

Schwab makes the case that powerful people should use the COVID crisis to impose authoritarian controls, pervasive surveillance, oppressive new economic models and one-world government on a beleaguered, terrified and compliant humanity. The Great Reset is WEF’s plan to rebuild a new controlled economy systematically after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Schwab and Prince Charles unveiled “The Great Reset” at a WEF summit in May 2020. It is a vision for transferring the world into a totalitarian and authoritarian surveillance state manipulated by technocrats to manage traumatized populations, to shift wealth upward, and serve the interests of elite billionaire oligarchs. To “reset” global food policies, the WEF has promoted and partnered with an organization called EAT Forum, which describes itself as the “Davos for food.”

EAT’s co-founder is Wellcome Trust, an organization founded, funded by and strategically linked to vaccine maker GlaxoSmithKline, in which Gates is heavily invested. EAT’s biggest initiative is called FReSH, which the organization describes as an effort to drive the transformation of the food system. The project’s partners include Bayer, Cargill, Syngenta, Unilever, and tech giant Google.

The EAT Forum works with these companies to “add value to business and industry” and “set the political agenda.” To further this profit-making enterprise, EAT collaborates with nearly 40 city governments in Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, South America and Australia. The organization also assists the Gates-funded United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in the “creation of new dietary guidelines” and sustainable development initiatives.

According to Frederic Leroy, a food science and biotechnology professor at University of Brussels, EAT network is working closely with some of the biggest imitation meat companies, including Impossible Foods and other biotech companies, to replace wholesome nutritious foods with Gates’ genetically modified lab concoctions.

“They frame it as healthy and sustainable, which of course it is neither,” Leroy told The Defender.

Dr. Shiva also scoffs at Gates’ perennial propaganda claims that his GMO meats are about feeding kids and derailing climate change:

“Lab-processed fake food is really about patenting our food, not about feeding people or saving the climate, as Gates and his fellow biotech friends pretend. EAT’s proposed diet is not about nutrition at all, it’s about big business and it’s about a corporate takeover of the food system.”

Leroy added:

“Companies like Unilever and Bayer and other pharmaceutical companies are already chemical processors, so many of these companies are very well positioned to profit off of this new food business which revolves around processing chemicals and extracts needed to produce these lab-made foods on a global scale.”

Fortified foods

Synthetic and GMO foods tend to be low in the vital micronutrients that support human health. Glyphosate, for example, functions as a chelator. It kills weeds by leaching out the mineral building blocks of life. Farm crops exposed to glyphosate have far less nutritional value than natural foods.

People eating Gates’ processed, synthetic and GMO foods may have full stomachs, while being clinically malnourished. Gates is rushing to solve this problem by buying technologies and partnering with companies like Roche and Kraft that fortify foods artificially with minerals and vitamins. He is simultaneously promoting laws in developing nations to mandate food fortification. Those laws benefit pesticide and processed food companies to the disadvantage of traditional and organic farmers. Since U.S. companies, like Roche, Kraft, General Foods and Philip Morris already fortify their processed cheese and cereals, they are Gates’ enthusiastic partners in this grift.

I saw this hustle perpetrated by another Big Food swindler earlier in my career. In 2003, I was representing thousands of small-plot Polish farmers in the battle to keep Smithfield Foods’ industrial pork factories out of Poland. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister, Andrzej Lepper, told me that Smithfield officials offered him a $1 million bribe to support a law requiring slaughterhouses to install high tech hygiene technology including laser-operated restroom faucets. Smithfield knew the law would have the effect of shuttering the 2,600 family operated abattoirs that made Poland’s signature kielbasa sausage. As the only entity that could afford the lasers, Smithfield would thereby gain monopoly control of Poland’s slaughter capacity and 100% of its lucrative kielbasa exports.

Gates took his food fortification laws from Smithfield’s playbook. By mandating that all foods be fortified, Kraft products like Cheez Whiz and American Singles, and its vitamin-fortified Kool-Aid and Tang, are positioned to displace locally produced goat cheese and goat milk in village markets and put small African farmers out of business.

To promote his mandatory fortified foods agenda, Gates created another of his useful quasi-governmental organizations, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to assist multinational food companies (Gates’ business partners) in lobbying for favorable tariffs and tax rates for processed and fortified foods, and speedier regulatory review of new products in targeted countries. Gates’ GAIN consortium also gives local governments money to stimulate demand for fortified foods through large-scale public relations campaigns or by offering governmental “seals of approval” for corporate food products.

Gates, GAVI and GAIN

Gates modeled his GAIN project after his billion-dollar global vaccine program (GAVI). By masquerading as a public health agency, GAVI has successfully mobilized public agencies and private industry to profitably dump untested, experimental or discredited, and often deadly vaccines to inoculate poor children in developing nations.

Following the GAVI model, Gates launched his $70 million GAIN program at the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Children. His collaboration includes the UN agencies Gates controls, such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, and the Big Processed Food companies like Philip Morris and Kraft, in which he has investments.

According to Vandana Shiva, GAIN’s objective is to “coordinate campaigns that pressure African and Asian countries to give obscene subsidies, tax breaks and tariff exemptions and other preferences for processed foods.”

Some experts are troubled by the idea of Bill Gates and multinational food companies teaming up to colonize food systems in underdeveloped countries, and hawking processed foods under a public health banner.

Dr. Mark Hyman, the New York Times bestselling author and Head of Strategy and Innovation at the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, told me:

“ … despite occasionally being fortified with vitamins and minerals processed foods are loaded with sugar, starch, processed oils, artificial colors, preservatives, pesticides and sodium which contribute to the double burden of obesity and malnutrition, and the chronic disease epidemic. Globally 11 million die every year from an excess of ultra-processed foods and lack of protective whole foods, making processed food the number one killer in the world.”

Dr. Hyman calls those foods “the opposite” of nutrition. Shiva agrees. “The GAIN program,” says Shiva, “is less about solving malnutrition than a heavy-handed way to force poor nations to open access to their markets, to obliterate local producers.”

“Fortified foods are illusory technical solutions to complex socioeconomic problems. Social and economic solutions would work better in the long run,” argues Professor Marion Nestle. Nestle is the revered food and nutrition icon who occupies the Paulette Goddard Chair of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. Nestle, the author of Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, told me:

“With one exception, iodized salt, fortified foods cost too much, fail to reach their intended targets, or are too limited in scope to do what they are intended to do. I see these laws as solving a problem for the companies that make these products, not addressing nutrient and calorie deficiencies. I’m not a fan of fortified foods. I want a wide variety of real foods made more available and less expensive, and locally produced. So I would agree with the critics. I wish the Gates Foundation would invest in projects to promote small, local food production.”

Artificial intelligence: ridding the world of farmers

Gates says he wants to revive farm economies by transforming agriculture with super-efficient, high tech AI to create “farms of the future.” According to Gates:

“We used to all have to go out and farm. We barely got enough food, when the weather was bad people would starve. Now through better seeds, fertilizer, lots of things, most people are not farmers. And so AI will bring us immense new productivity.”

Above all, he wants it to work fast. Gates’ “computational acceleration” will hasten the adoption of these beneficial innovations to achieve his ambitious schemes to deliver scientific breakthroughs to small farmers before climate change destroys their yields.

But Shiva warns American farmers, already drowning in debt, to be wary of Gates’ promises to throw them a line:

“When Bill Gates forced his devilish ‘rescue’ technologies on Indian farmers, the only one to benefit was Gates and his multinational partners. He gave money to the government and a company called Digital Green and made extravagant promises to digitally transform Indian agriculture. Then with the cooperation of his purchased government officials.

“Bill Gates put cameras and electronic sensors in the homes and fields of Indian farmers. He used their cell phones, which he gave them for free, and his fiber optic and 5G installations — which he persuaded the Indian Telecom Company to finance — to catalog, study, and steal farmers’ crop data, indigenous practices, and agricultural knowledge for free. Then he sold it back to them as new data. Instead of digitally transforming farms as he promised, he transformed Indian farmers into digital information. He privatized their seeds and harvested the work of the public system. He ripped out their knowledge assets and heirloom genetics, and installed GMO seeds and other ridiculous practices.” Shiva adds, “His clear agenda was to drive small farmers from the land and eventually mechanize and privatize food production.”

Christian Westbrook, an agricultural researcher and the founder of the online podcast, “Ice Age Farmer,” takes comfort that American farmers know Gates’ history in India and Africa: “We know who Bill Gates is, and we know the mischief he made for small farmers in Mexico, Africa and India. We know that his recent land purchases here are just the start of the Green Revolution 3.0. He wants to suck out the democratic essence of America’s pastoral landscapes and our farm families — to steal our livelihoods, our knowledge, our seeds, and our land.”

Westbrook takes note of the fact that like all chiselers, Gates is always in a rush:

“His strategy is to keep everyone moving so fast they can’t see the scam. He’s always telling us that climate change can’t wait, that we need to accelerate access to these products and adoption of his technologies, that research isn’t happening fast enough.”

Westbrook told me that Gates’ endless talk about “accelerating the process” and his extravagant promises of miraculous new technologies, of “investment,” and of “public-private” partnerships, are all part of his con. “He keeps telling everyone we need to ‘accelerate, accelerate, accelerate.’”

Many farmers say they don’t care to be rescued by Gates. Westbrook says he thinks Gates intends his baronial U.S. spreads to serve as flagships — showcases for his retinue of digital technologies for American farmers. “He’s doing it for the same reasons he brought his technology to Indian farms — to steal their knowledge, and move them off the land.”

Trent Loos, a sixth-generation Midwestern rancher and farm activist, told me that farmers have a knee-jerk reaction against billionaires “playing Monopoly” with American farmland:

“It makes it difficult for young farmers or even those who have farmed for generations, to compete with such deep pockets. It certainly creates a barrier for them. When people with this type of wealth start to buy farms, it makes us wonder what they are really up to. Nobody wants to rent land from Bill Gates, or work as his sharecropper.”

Westbrook says he believes Gates is pursuing a darker agenda. Like Shiva, Westbrook believes that Gates and the other robber barons are using the pretexts of climate, biodiversity, and the zoonotic pandemic threat to get human beings out of the ag business and off the farm. And there is evidence to support him. The Gates Foundation is significantly invested in Alphabet, Google’sparent company. Alphabet has invented “crop sniffing” robots, designed to replace farmers and ranchers, as part of its “Mineral” project. Its “Moonshot” project is “developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics, and more.”

Within a year of purchasing Whole Foods, Jeff Bezos — Gates has a considerable investment in Amazon — also invested heavily in robot-controlled vertical farms that also minimize human involvement with farming.

Says Westbrook, “He wants to get the people off of the farms, get the animals off, and get us all eating his plant-based meats and bug protein.”

“Gates talks about farming as an archaic, quaint, dirty, dangerous, inefficient, barbarous relic from the past that threatens us by increasing the menace of climate change and the risks of global pandemics by putting humans in dangerous contact with microbes,” says Howard Vlieger, an Iowa farmer who has worked as a crop and livestock consultant in the U.S. and Canada since 1992.

Vlieger is an expert on the impacts of pesticides and GMOs on food products and soils. “Gates’ objective is to move the world “away from sustainable and humane animal agriculture that celebrates our contact with the soil and finds good health in our respectful interactions with nature — and toward artificial cows and a grim chemical paradigm that are all features of top-down dystopia. His vision is one of contaminated and unsavory foods and separation of man from nature.”

“Gates seems to have no concept of the joy that ordinary people — people like our family — take in farming,” Nicolette Niman told me. Niman is a California rancher and farmer, and the author of the books “Righteous Porkchop” and “Defending Beef.” Her husband Bill is the founder of Niman Ranch, a co-op of hundreds of small sustainable U.S. cattle and hog growers who market high-quality organic beef and pork from sustainable grass-fed operations.

Regenerative farming and ranching immeasurably enriches human lives. It’s challenging work, based upon our intimate contact with the earth. At its best, good farming is a quest to understand and follow nature’s models,” Niman said. Niman says that Gates seems to have little interest in nature’s wisdom:

“He doesn’t seem to understand that our engagement with the soil, and joy we get from our contact with the earth, our complex relationship with our animals, even with all the hardships and difficulties, are sources of our freedom and our pride, and happiness at being masters of our destinies.”

“We need to build a world that respects individual self-determination, the humane treatment of animals, and good stewardship of our soils. We need to understand that a wholesome relationship with nature is not only vital to our health and climate, it’s the source of dignity, liberty, and enrichment in our post-industrial era.”

Using wide-ranging technologies, all of these activists from various continents expressed their discomfort with Gates’ tendency to look at population, rather than people, and to see the management of population as a problem in urgent need of his technological solutions.

“Gates sees the forest, not the trees,” Vlieger observes. “And even when he looks at the forest, he only seems to see board feet of lumber — how he can leverage the landscapes for cash and commoditize people.” Vlieger continues:

“Gates’ habit of seeing every human difficulty through the lens of some technological solution from which he can profit is beyond myopic. It’s pathology — sociopathology, really. Gates is a dangerously powerful sociopath with $137 billion and a vision for a top-down technocracy. Does that worry anybody?”

Westbrook says Gates, Cargill and Tyson are a powerful cartel on a mission to end animal agriculture and drive human beings from farms. “It is ‘replacement agriculture,’” says Westbrook. “They even use that word, ‘alternative agriculture.’”

Westbrook’s view of the dystopian future of technocratic totalitarianism envisioned by Bill Gates sounds like a baseless conspiracy theory if one ignores all the evidence supporting him. He predicts that we will very soon — in months, not years — see engineered food shortages and pressures to empty and “improve” the rural landscapes by idling farmland and replacing farm jobs with robots and artificial intelligence.

Westbrook predicts government efforts to push populations toward mega cities and smart cities where businesses are closed, jobs are scarce, and most of us will rely on universal basic income paid in digital currencies — revocable, of course, in cases of noncompliance and disobedience. Westbrook predicts a scenario “where the human cattle are completely dependent on the government for money and food, and all the folks are in one place in the smart cities and they’re easily monitored by the technocrats of Gates’ Great Reset.” Westbrook continued:

“They’re shutting down food production and actually more, more broadly, they’re shutting down all economic activity, all human activity, corralling us into their smart cities. It’s pretty appalling. And now that we’ve got these pandemics, we had to implement medical martial law, and since it’s all a health crisis, we’re also going to have to take over all of your food productions and your nutritional needs. They’ve married these two things.”

Time will tell us if Westbrook’s nightmare is merely a paranoid conspiracy theory — I hope so.

Food Systems Summit

In 2009, Bill Gates, an unelected billionaire with no governmental office or diplomatic portfolio, kicked off his global vaccine enterprise with a speech to the United Nations. He announced the $10 billion donation and declared the launch of his “Decade of Vaccines.His scheme unfolded like clockwork. Gates’ contributions secured him ironclad control over WHO. As Foreign Affairs has reported, “Few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.”

Gates created and funded powerful faux-governmental agencies like PATH, GAVI, CEPI, and the Brighton Collaboration, to push vaccines in developing countries, to consolidate his control over public health, and to prepare the groundwork for the global vaccine putsch he had pre-scheduled for 2020.

In January 2019, the WHO dutifully declared — citing no specific evidence — that “vaccine hesitancy” was one of the principal threats to global health. The Gates’ Medical Cartel followed that statement with orchestrated campaigns in every U.S. state and in countries around the globe by pharma-financed politicians introducing laws to mandate vaccines and end exemptions.

Two months later, the powerful House Intelligence Committee chair, Adam Schiff — yet another of Gates’ financial beneficiaries — demanded social media and media companies begin censoring “vaccine misinformation” — a euphemism for any assertion that departs from official pharma and government pronouncements. Gates has giant stakes in Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook. Those companies all began enthusiastically censoring criticism of vaccines.

A year later, the COVID-19 outbreak provided an opportunity of convenience for Gates and his vaccine cartel to consolidate their control of humanity. A May 2020 article by Derrick Broze in The Last American Vagabond observed that, “By tracing the Foundation’s investments and Gates’ relationships we can see that nearly every person involved in the fight against COVID-19 is tied to Gates or his Foundation by two degrees or less.” Their relationship gave Bill Gates and his Foundation an unchallenged influence over the response to the pandemic.

Gates repeatedly declared, in appearances on virtually every network and cable show and on every media platform, that all economic activity must cease until all 7 billion humans were vaccinated and possessed immunization passports. His ten-year Decade of Vaccines that began with his UN appearance had gone off without a hitch. Under the leadership of Gates’ old protégé and loyalist, Fauci, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services arranged immunity from liability for COVID vaccines and committed $48 billion in taxpayer money to buy and distribute a retinue of new experimental vaccines, many of them owned by Gates.

Gates’ control of the process has been complete. His execution of his vaccine prediction was elegant and flawless. And now Gates’ surrogates are rolling out the same playbook to push through his totalitarian food agenda.

During the October 14 -18 plenary of the 46th Session of the UN Committee on World Food Security, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, announced the convening of a UN Food Systems Summit in 2021. Guterres acknowledged that the Summit had been jointly requested by the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Economic Forum (WEF). Bill Gates and his foundation generously fund and control all four organizations.

The UN Food Systems Summit effectively announced a parallel agenda to the one launched by the WEF when it hosted its Great Reset conference in June, 2020. In their research into the UN Food Systems Summit, AGRA Watch (the grassroots advocacy group that follows Gates and his foundation’s failed Green Revolution in Africa) found that of the 12 individuals involved in the Summit, 11 have strong connections to the Gates Foundation.

According to Heather Day of AGRA Watch, in some instances, these organizations were directly funded by the Gates Foundation and others Gates-funded specific programs that had major roles: “So his fingers aren’t just in it; almost every single one of the participants is working for Bill Gates. These are the authors of the UN food systems summit.” The Food Systems Summit is a 100% Gates project.

It gets worse: The coordinator of Gates’ “Decade of Food Security” is Dr. Agnes Kalibata. Kalibata is the President of Gates/Rockefeller’s AGRA program that orchestrated Gates’ notorious failed Green Revolution in Africa. Kalibata is the perfect leader to bring AGRA to the world. The Summit, she predicts, will bring together all the major stakeholders in a public-private partnership “to make food systems inclusive, climate adapted and resilient, and support sustainable peace.”

Kalibata reminded Food Systems Summit participants of the urgency. They had, she said, only 10 years left to accelerate the transformation of our food systems to meet Sustainable Development Goals for climate, nutrition and pandemic response.

The UN Food Systems Summit will lay out Gates’ “Decade of Food” blueprint for the global food agenda to be completed by 2030. We can only pray that Gates’ next new health plan for humanity won’t involve the same level of traumatic violence to our civil rights, to our global economy, to the traditions of our civilization, to the idealism of democracies, and to our self-determination, that accompanied his 2020 “Decade of Vaccines.”

Day is pessimistic: “Gates’ plan will be a roadmap of how to replace everything that is good about farming with the technocrats’ own systems for jobless farming, chemical food and bug protein,” predicts Day.

Conclusion

The Gates Foundation is not conventional philanthropy. It gives miniscule, if any, support to popular causes like the Wounded Warrior Foundation, ASPCA, environmental, or voting rights or civil rights groups.

It is a weaponized philanthropy that Gates launched in 1994 to resuscitate his reputation after the Microsoft antitrust case exposed him as a lying, cheating, thieving, manipulator intent on felonious monopoly control of global information conduits.

Gates has since invested $36 billion into the Gates Foundation, which has a value of $46.9 billionover which he and his wife exercise total control. The foundation has given away only $23.6 billionin charitable grants, and these “gifts” include billions in tax-deductible donations to companies in which Gates is invested, like Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Sanofi.

Gates’ brilliant mind devised this scheme to form a foundation that shelters his income, and allows him to leverage taxpayer dollars by investing the foundation’s earnings in projects that multiply his wealth and expand his power and public prestige, while avoiding taxes.

Using this structure, he can give tax-deductible donations to companies he partly owns and reap personal and foundation profits while avoiding taxes — and allowing him to hide his money in myriad ways. It’s a win-win! Gates has deployed his foundation as the embodiment of his base instincts for monopoly and control — a vehicle for ruthless philanthrocapitalism that hijacks public access and blurs the lines between corporate and public interests, cloaks private profit agendas with lofty public-spirited rhetoric and gives himself monopoly control over public health, our planet’s life support systems, our economics and people.

Gates has made his foundation a tool for consolidating the efforts of his fellow billionaires, captured regulators, and his business partners from Big Pharma, Dirty Energy, GMO food, Telecom and Big Data, and the bought and brain-dead journalists who collectively profit from the multiplying miseries of the dystopian world they have arranged for the rest of us. Gates and his cronies, toadies and minions pump up fear of pandemics, climate change, mass extinction — and offer his vision of new technologies as the salvation, which only he possesses the genius to deploy.

Even as he consolidates control over our health and food systems, Gates is promoting digitalized currencies, calling these systems a “global humanitarian priority.” (Kissinger’s final adjuration is, “Who controls money can control the world”), and in funding ground and space-based and 5G infrastructures, city-sized analytics centers, and biometric chips to mine and harvest our data and biodata and as mechanisms of surveillance, profit, and control.

Gates is planning a satellite fleet that will be able to survey every square inch of the planet 24 hours per day. Such systems will no doubt be useful should populations become restless with political and economic structures that strip citizens of power, shift wealth ever upward, and doom most of humanity to meaningless, hopeless survival.

Democracy and farm freedom advocate Dr. Vandana Shiva says that Gates’ philanthrocapitalism is a “destructive force with the potential to push the future of our planet towards extinction and ecological collapse.” Shiva accuses Gates of using philanthropic capitalism to accelerate the corporate takeover of our seed, agriculture, food, knowledge and global health systems. “He funds the manipulation of information and promotes the erosion of democracy — all in pursuit of personal power and profits.”

Shiva says the Gates Foundation has powered an “unholy alliance” between big capital, science and technology institutions and governments to establish a global empire over life, through monocultures, patents and monopolies designed to destroy the natural world of diversity, self-organization and freedom.

“You have seen the wickedness they can do with vaccines in the name of public health,” Shiva told me. “Well, now he controls the land. He controls the seed. He controls the food. He has the ultimate power to starve us all to death.”

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Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s reputation as a resolute defender of the environment stems from a litany of successful legal actions.

Cash For Gongs: Prince Charles honoured tycoon Lord Brownlow who bailed out his failed eco-village

Prince Charles honoured tycoon Lord Brownlow who bailed out his failed eco-village

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/prince-charles-honoured-tycoon-lord-brownlow-who-bailed-out-his-eco-village-z2l9cx2mk?shareToken=fce657019d1d0091db4a2ac2145e2f1b

Heir to the throne ignored aides advice against close ties with Tory peer

Gabriel Pogrund Saturday July 02 2022, The Sunday Times

The Prince of Wales gave an honour to a controversial Tory peer who spent 1.7 million bailing out his failed eco-village in a string of secretive deals being investigated by the charity watchdog.Prince Charles presented Lord Brownlow with the award during a ceremony at Buckingham Palace after accepting millions of pounds in donations from him.


His flagship charity also opened up Dumfries House, his 18th-century country estate in Scotland, for Brownlow’s 50th birthday a black-tie event involving fireworks, bagpipes and a performance by a celebrity magician and awarded the businessman’s company a 1.2 million construction contract.

Lord Brownlow was made a Commander of the Victorian Order (CVO), an elite honour approved by the Queen

Brownlow, a recruitment tycoon, is best known for his role in funding the refurbishment of Boris Johnson’s Downing Street flat and was also recently reported to have been considered as a potential donor to pay 150,000 for a treehouse for the prime ministers son.


Charles became close with the peer, whose fortune has been estimated at 271 million by The Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, after ignoring the advice of one of his most senior courtiers. The palace insider was concerned Brownlow, 58, was using Charles to burnish his reputation, felt he had myriad conflicts of interest and believed his judgment was wayward. They shared their views with the prince.

In 2013 Charles, 73, appointed Brownlow as a trustee of the Princes Foundation, which manages Dumfries House.

Charles had bought the mansion from the Marquess of Bute by taking out a 20 million loan six years earlier.

He also acquired a nearby piece of farmland, Knockroon, at a cut-price rate. Charles saw the construction and sale of faux-Georgian homes there as an ideal way of repaying the Dumfries House debt. The development was also supposed to bring jobs and homes to a depressed former mining community and exhibit his values of traditional and sustainable architecture in practice.

There was a severe shortfall in demand: just 31 of 770 homes were built and its value was written down from 15 million to 700,000. By 2015 Hope Homes, the princes developer, had withdrawn from the project and a leading Scottish architect, Professor Alan Dunlop, described the princes vision as an imported pastiche and a curious mix of relatively expensive homes dropped into a rural setting that should have never been built.

Today plans to complete Knockroon have been abandoned. Residents complain it is a ghost town that Charles rarely visits despite routinely spending weekends entertaining donors and relaxing and unwinding at his nearby estate.

Brownlow incorporated his own property company, Havisham Properties, and started buying homes at Knockroon from a subsidiary of the Princes Foundation. Between 2012 and 2017 he spent 1.7 million purchasing 11 properties and converting them into buy-to-lets and a cafe according to official documents. The charity did not declare any of the purchases as related party transactions. This is a standard measure used to guard against perceived conflicts of interest and to demonstrate that trustees knew that money was going to someone who had existing ties to the charity.

It is unclear whether Brownlow paid for the use of the estate for his birthday in 2013

 

During this period the foundation also awarded Brownlows company a series of contracts. In 2015 it gave him an estimated 1.2 million worth of work to build three properties on the estate, which a source said were cottages for staff. In the same year the charity seconded charitable staff to run Da Vincis, his companys cafe housed in what was supposed to be Knockroon visitor centre. It also purchased an item of home furnishing on behalf of Mr Brownlow which he later repaid, and paid him 8,590 in rent. The following year, accounts state that his company received 715,668 for building the staff homes. The foundation would not say if there was an open competition or tender exercise to award the contracts.

As a trustee, Brownlow had oversight of the sale of properties and awarded contracts to his own company. Trustees retain ultimate responsibility for all expenditure by a charity and have a legal duty to ensure payments offer value for money and further the charitys goals.

The inquiry by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator has confirmed for the first time that it is investigating Brownlows decision to buy up unwanted properties at Knockroon. We can confirm that the work of Havisham Group [Brownlows company] and property transactions relating to the Knockroon development in Ayrshire forms part of our overall investigation, work on which is ongoing, a spokesman said.

In September 2013, months after he started bailing out Knockroon, Brownlow hosted his 50th birthday party at Dumfries House, which is only partially open to the public through 60-minute paid tours during the summer. Some of the house is available for private hire, but only when the prince is not using the premises. It is unclear whether Brownlow paid for the use of the estate and, if so, whether he was charged at the normal commercial rate. There were performances by Dynamo, the celebrity magician, Alfie Boe, the prominent English tenor, and Cirque du Soleil acrobatic fire-dancers.

Lord Brownlow with the Prince of Wales, the Queen and Prince Harry at the Chelsea Flower Show

Shortly after Brownlow completed his purchase of the properties and quit as a trustee, in 2018, the prince personally gave him a royal honour at Buckingham Palace. He was made a Commander of the Victorian Order (CVO), an elite honour approved by the Queen.

The investiture in which Brownlow was made a CVO was apparently not disclosed on the court circular, the official list of royal engagements. The entry for that date states: The Prince of Wales this afternoon attended an Accounting for Sustainability Forum at St Jamess Palace and afterwards held a reception at Clarence House. The honour means Brownlows formal title now ends with the initials CVO. He uses the style on his parliamentary and business websites.

The CVO is conferred for extraordinary, important or personal services to the royal family and is one of the awards bestowed at the sole discretion of the monarchy rather than one the advice of politicians. Brownlow was appointed to the order as part of the Queens Birthday honours list in 2018, with the official notice describing him as the former chairman of Charless foundation. The following year, Brownlow was knighted and Theresa May nominated him to the House of Lords in 2019.

The disclosures come a week after The Sunday Times revealed that Charles accepted a suitcase of cash from the former prime minister of Qatar.

They pose fresh questions of the princes judgment. Charles had welcomed Brownlow into his circle of trust even after an adviser expressed reservations about his motivations. Brownlow was very influential, but it was felt that he was not an entirely benign influence on the prince, a palace insider said. Of Brownlow, who was a trustee, donor and commercial partner of the charity at once, the source said: He had myriad conflicts of interest. His judgment was wayward. This certainly came up in conversation with the prince.

According to the royal source, Charles was expressly told that Brownlow seemed more interested in the psychic reward of being close to the prince and being invited to dinners at Dumfries House. I think it just sort of gave him a kick that he could talk to his friends and say, I just had another dinner with the Prince of Wales. I mean, I think more about that [than money], to be honest, the source said.

Charles first became involved with Brownlow through his Foundation for Integrated Health, a controversial body that championed alternative medicine and lobbied for pseudoscientific treatments to be made available on the NHS. Brownlow chaired the body briefly but it was closed after the conviction of an official for stealing from the organisation in 2010. A year later he was invited to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton and received a prime seat at Westminster Abbey.

Brownlow attended the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011

Brownlow is not the first Dumfries House donor to get an honour from Charles during a private event at the Queens home. Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire, who had given 1.5 million to Charles’ causes including the estate, was appointed CBE. That honour is the subject of a Metropolitan Police investigation under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.

A Princes Foundation spokeswoman said: Lord Brownlow was appointed CVO in 2018 in recognition of his role of chair of the charity The Princes Foundation for Building Community.

Brownlow was made a CVO as part of the Queens Birthday honours list in 2018

Asked if Brownlow paid to use the estate and, if so, how much she said: Dumfries House is a beautiful country estate which has for many years been available to members of the public to hire for special events. She added: The proceeds are ploughed back into the princes foundation to support its charitable work.

A Clarence House spokesman said: Chairpersons of charities closely associated with the royal family are often appointed to the Royal Victorian Order to thank them for their public service, on completion of their tenure.

Brownlow did not respond to a request for comment.

Jack Hargreaves Preserved On Film The Extinguished Country Crafts We All Need To Survive Economic Collapse

Jack Hargreaves Preserved On Film Extinguished Country Crafts We Will All Need To Survive The Economic Collapse
We will need his country crafts long into the future, so who really was the man with a pipe in the shed who refused to read from a script, Jack Hargreaves?

https://www.southwestfarmer.co.uk/news/1010441.really-jack-hargreaves/  8th November 2006

The long running television series ‘Out of Town’ made Jack Hargreaves a broadcasting legend. With his unique trademarks of battered hat, pipe, whiskers and an old Barbour jacket he cast off, virtually single-handed, the notion that a television presenter had to wear a bow tie and a morning suit.

He was the first man to be filmed catching a fish on television in the late 1950s in the programme Gone Fishing and went on to expand the format to all matters rural in the programme’s eventual replacement, Out of Town, which started as a fifteen minute local broadcast in the Southern Region but grew eventually to be a truly national phenomenon as it was taken up by all the regional franchises in the 1960s and ’70s. The programme was honoured in the 1970s when the National Film archive chose to preserve two episodes for posterity, saying that ‘when they finally cover Britain with concrete, they will have something to remind them of what it was all about.’ Rewriting the rule book The programme was an innovation in broadcasting as Jack Hargreaves rewrote the rule book and made the programmes with a simple team of two people; himself and cameraman Stan Bréhaut, a man described by Jack as ‘the finest outdoor cameraman in England.’ Sadly Stan died in 2005 but the 1000 Out of Town programmes he filmed remain as a tribute to his unique abilities. A producer was allocated to the project in the early days but he realised he was just getting in the way of a perfect team so the two were simply left to get on with it. This created a true feeling of intimacy where each viewer was inevitably left with the feeling that Jack was doing the programme solely for his benefit.

The programme’s real heyday was in the 1970s when it was a true family viewing requirement spanning across the generations as Jack, with the assistance of experts such as Ollie Kite, showed us the techniques and traditions of everything from field sports to dying crafts. It is a testament to the quality of these programmes that the DVDs of the series are still proving great sellers with a new generation of fans being introduced to the legend as video gives way to a digital format. Somehow Jack’s shed seems timeless, its probable contents making us all feel like the proverbial kid in the sweetshop.

The programme ran for twenty two years, ending in 1982 but was revived by Channel Four as The Old Country for a further three series which could still attract one and a quarter million viewers each week in spite of competition from an entertainment industry obsessed with Star Wars and big budget special effects.

So what made Jack Hargreaves special?

He never boasted that he was the world’s greatest angler or the finest shot. He did, however, pride himself on being a true all rounder. As he fished he could furnish you with tales of the rodent scurrying down the bank on the other side of the river or tell you about the life cycle of the swallow overhead. His knowledge was complete, as was his appreciation of rural life. It is this unique and far reaching understanding which always made him the perfect raconteur rather than a didactic teacher.

But who was Jack Hargreaves the man?

He certainly did not appear ready formed as the man we all welcomed in to our homes each week. In fact the development of Jack Hargreaves the man is certainly a tale at least equal to the story of the Out of Town Programme.

John Herbert Hargreaves, the second of three sons, was born in London in 1914. At the time his father was described on the birth certificate as a commercial traveller although he eventually bought his former employer to become a wool manufacturer in Huddersfield, Yorkshire. Although financially well off, Jack’s childhood was not always happy and it was as a last resort that he was sent to spend time on the farm of a family friend. Suddenly he had found his own vocation as he was introduced to the responsibilities and privileges of farm life by Victor Pargeter of Burston Hill Farm.

Jack went on to study veterinary science in the 1930s but had to curtail his studies due to his father’s bankruptcy, the result of a downturn in the wool industry and fierce competition. Between this sudden change in fortunes and his eventual fame as a broadcaster his CV took him on a veritable roller coaster of jobs. These included writing copy for Spratt’s Dog Biscuits, designing the tableaux for the stationary naked women at the Windmill Theatre, producing up to eighty hours of popular programmes each week for independent radio, running a PR campaign for the Tory Party in the 1950s, running the PR department at the NFU and working as a director of programmes at Southern Television. And that’s not to mention his role in the eventual popularity of the song Lily Marlene during the Second World War, his role in changing the format of children’s TV programmes forever with the wonderful and innovative How and making yachts affordable for people who earned rather less than movie stars.

The fascinating and often surprising life of Jack Hargreaves is detailed in a new book, Jack Hargreaves – A Portrait, by journalist and author Paul Peacock who has spent the last year and a half talking extensively to members of the family and friends. The result is a wonderful insight into one man’s innovation and resilience and how these qualities enabled him to become the character we all recall so fondly. The book is published by Farming Books and Videos Ltd. and is available from the 27th June 2006 priced £20.00. All nine DVDs are also available from the same source, each one comprising of three complete episodes from the 1970s. To learn more please visit www.farmingbooksandvideos.com or telephone on 01772 652693.

a landrights campaign for Britain

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