The United Kingdom is crisscrossed with public footpaths where the public holds a legal right to traverse.

Many of these paths are centuries old. Many of them are probably even older, dating back thousands of years to the Neolithic or older.

They predate virtually every extant property claim that could be leveraged against them. They have belonged in common to the community that uses them since before there was a British state.

And yet, the British state is in the process of handing over thousands of miles of public footpaths to private owners because these paths—older than the state—have not been registered with the state. In James Scott’s terms, they are not *legible* to the state.

But carefully surveyed, delineated, discrete parcels of private property linked to individual owners—the state’s favorite—are legible to the state. So over they go.

Enclosure never really stopped.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/public-access-paths-lost-landowners-lobby-government-therese-coffey-england/

It never ceases to shame me that standing up for desperate human beings fleeing for their lives & thinking we should protect them is “political.”

Yet turning refugees back at sea & locking them up is a neutral view.

It ain’t.

Pick a side.

compassion or cruelty

#lineker

I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.

Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you...

It doesn't walk in saying,
"Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution."

-- Michael Rosen

#quotes #quote

Amazing win for a long environmental campaign here - one of the first I worked on.

In 1998, John Howard had introduced a “Mandatory Renewable Energy Target” of 2% (we distributed beer bottles with “2% MRET Weak As Piss” labels when I was at #Greenpeace, but that’s another story).

One of the poison pills he inserted was to include in the definition of renewable energy “native forest biomass”. Old growth logging was becoming economically unviable, so the loggers wanted a new income stream. If, as well as pulping ancient and precious habitat for toilet paper, they could sell more of the “waste” to burn for energy and get Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) for it, what a boon!

We called them Dead Koala RECs and launched a campaign which stopped new power stations being built. But it wasn’t until the 2011 Clean Energy Package that we finally got the definition scrubbed from the RET.

Independent Rob Oakeshott, to his shame, tried to scupper that through a disallowance motion the next year, but thankfully was defeated.

But then Tony Abbott and Greg Hunt came along and gleefully put Dead Koala RECs back on the table when they trashed the carbon price.

Finally, this week, Janet Rice’s hard work with the new government has delivered again, and burning native forests for energy is no longer called renewable in Australia.

Let’s hope, after almost a quarter of a century, this is the end of the line for this stupid idea. Leave the #forests standing and generate real #renewableEnergy

RT @[email protected]

HEART DISEASE deaths surged by 17% in Australia in 2022 — and doctors agree Covid-19 is the culprit. Covid-19 led to a surge in myocarditis, pericarditis, pulmonary embolism, heart attack and stroke, and the majority of the 15,400 excess deaths in 2022 were from Covid-19. #auspol