Is the exit of Steve Bannon from the White House staff a sign, as some have suggested, that we are reaching end game for the Trump presidency? Or is that just wishful thinking?

I was hardly alone in believing Trump couldn’t last seven weeks in the job, let alone seven months. Yet here he still is, while his aides keep falling like discarded, broken playthings.

When Bannon himself said it was the end of the presidency, it turned out he only meant that the more aggressive decision-making might now be toned down.

While Trump waved Bannon bye-bye (via Twitter, of course), with this thumbs-up for his right-wing propaganda website Breitbart News: “Fake News needs the competition!” As if Trump was capable of distinguishing fake from real.

With so much misunderstanding and misinformation trotting out on the information super-highway, it can be hard even for a grown-up to tell the thoroughbred from the pantomime donkey.

Is this life itself the real thing, or are we just a simulation created in some greater being’s experiment or game? Who can say for sure?

We’ve grown used to remarkably convincing CGI mammoths and dinosaurs wandering into our wildlife documentaries. And now with Sky Sports, “home of the Premier League”, also broadcasting an “Interactive World Cup” – football simulations played on PlayStation and Xbox – the line between real and pretend is getting very sketchy indeed.

Not that news, or reality, have ever been precisely what they seemed.

On the southern fringe of the French Alps lies the beautiful lake of Serre-Ponçon. It’s a favourite with windsurfers, kayakers, wild swimmers, sailors of small boats. But is it really a lake? It wasn’t there until the late 1950s, when a mighty 123-metre high dam was thrown across the Durance river.

As well as water sports, it powers 16 hydroelectric plants and provides irrigation to a huge area of land. Several villages were drowned in its creation, including one whose cemetery still stands at the water’s edge while the buildings lie beneath the ripples.

There’s a great photo of the village priest of Savines, seen from behind, watching his old church being dynamited in about 1959. It’s a brilliant composition and a brilliant piece of timing by a local newspaper photographer.

But is that really the priest, as his dress and his pose suggest? Who knows? It’s a great piece of story-telling about a real event anyway.

As is another shot from the same paper – surely staged – of an old woman washing clothes at the traditional outdoor village laundry while a massive concrete bridge towers high above her, still under construction.

As it happens, I know that bridge. I’ve crossed it several times. The roadway is just a few metres above the surface of the lake. You’d never guess how deep its legs reach under the water.

The flooding of those villages sounds like a classic modern tragedy. But then there’s this.

The dam and the lake were first proposed in 1856 – not for sport or power, but to save the villagers, and others further downstream, from any repeat of the devastating floods of that year and 13 years earlier. Nothing in this story is not exactly as it first seems.

Now there’s the worldwide web – a wonderful, unprecedented storehouse of information, but one in which it can be all but impossible to sort the good from the dodgy. The matter-of-fact from the well-meant wrong-end-of-the-stick. Or worse.

A photo made it onto the front page of a respected US newspaper last week showing a protester savagely beating a fallen police officer. Or that’s what the caption claimed it showed. It went viral online.

In fact the picture was several years old. It had been cropped to remove the evidence that it was actually taken in Greece, not Virginia. The anti-fascist logo on the attacker’s jacket had been added digitally. Faked news.

I wish I could unsee the picture of a dog, apparently skinned alive, which cropped up in my social media feed last week. Very grisly, very upsetting. But was it quite what it seemed? There were small clues that it might not have been been – surely there should have been more blood if the poor animal had really been alive. Or is that just wishful thinking again?

The purpose of those who posted it was to gather shocked “signatures” for an online petition. A worthy cause, no doubt, but does it do any good in the real world to heap up names in this way?

Great claims are sometimes made for such petitions as democracy in action. But I suspect they have become merely a modern form of prayer. An appeal to a distant higher authority. An expression of wishes. Something to make you feel better by giving you the illusion of doing something when there’s nothing you can do.

Now let us pray – and sign petitions – for the US to change its gun laws, to scrap its nuclear arsenal, and to stop waging war.

We all know by now that many times more Americans are shot dead by small children than are killed or wounded in terrorist attacks. That simple fact, at least, is not fake news.

Putting guns in the hands of infants is a very poor idea. And right now we have two tired toddlers – Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un – stropping around the world playground with very big guns indeed. It’s high time their toys were taken away.                                                                                                             

We live in an age when it’s possible to fly from London to Sydney in less than 24 hours and you can talk in real time to people anywhere. Presenters of TV documentaries can start a sentence in Siberia and end it in the Sahara.

Communications technology has shrunk the world. You might be forgiven for thinking there was nothing on the planet still to be discovered.

What a joyful surprise, then, to learn only last year that a previously unknown coral reef, amost 700 miles long, had been found off the coast of South America.

Joyful, and in a curious way something of a relief too. As if the discovery of a reef in one part of the world could compensate for the death of another, 10,000 miles away.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has been called “the canary in the coal mine” for global warming. Its reported death may be both symptom and further cause of ecological catastrophe on a massive scale.

Meanwhile, the newly discovered Amazon Reef appears to be thriving.

Corals live mostly in clear salt water with plenty of sunlight. This one has astonished marine biologists because the outflow from the Amazon makes its waters among the muddiest and least salty sea areas in the world.

Yet they have found there 73 species of fish, 60 types of sponge and a rich variety of other life. There are dolphins, turtles, manatees and species that haven’t yet been named.

The reef may have been unknown until recently, but its importance to the global ecosystem – and our knowledge of it – may be considerable. That Amazon outflow amounts to a fifth of all the water flowing into the world’s oceans.

Here then, is an amazing place. An environment and a habitat to cherish.

The last thing it needs is multinational oil companies diving in with their drills and rigs to rip it up, spoil and pollute it. One spill like BP’s 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster could do untold damage.

So who’s prospecting for oil on the Amazon Reef right now? BP and Total. They need to be stopped.

A man is walking along a bleak shoreline, where steepling mountains drop sheer cliffs to the edge of a swirling sea. Snow lies in the gullies and cracks in the rockface behind him. What may be the tip of a glacier spills towards the edge of the black sand.

It’s an incredibly wild, desolate and beautiful spot, where few people have ever walked. But it’s not untouched by human activity. Far from it.

The man in the woolly hat, camera slung round his neck, is Tim Nunn – Ipswich born, Norfolk raised, photographer extraordinary. I’ll let him speak for himself for a moment.

“We’re on a beach in the western end of the Lofoten islands [off northern Norway]. It’s taken us a good couple of hours to hike into it. There are more remote ones, but there aren’t many.

“It’s basically the end of the Gulf Stream, so anything that ends up in the sea right from the coast of America can end up here. There’s such a massive assortment of plastic. It’s all the way along the beach – tyres, water bottles… children’s toys… ”

You can see the rubbish strewn behind him. There is sand, but it’s basically a beach of washed-up garbage. And this far-flung place is not unusual. “It doesn’t matter how many beaches I go to,  it just gets more and more shocking.”

Tim made his name taking breathtaking photos of surfers in action. It’s taken him to some amazing places. Places which inspired him, but where he couldn’t help noticing change.

“I’ve spent the last 10 years or so just exploring and photographing some of the remotest coastlines of the North Atlantic,” he says. “Over this time I’ve seen a big shift from a lot of these coastlines being generally quite pristine to being really badly affected by rubbish, especially plastic.

“This goes for places which are close to big population centres or the very remotest Arctic beaches.”

My mother remembered meeting as a student around 1940 a young researcher who was highly excited about the new materials he was helping to develop in a Cambridge laboratory. Materials he was sure would have a profound effect on the world we live in.

He was right, of course – their effect would be profound. For good, in some ways. For convenience, certainly. But also in ways he surely didn’t foresee.

Those materials were plastics. They have gone within a lifetime from new and exciting to a blight upon every part of our planet.

Plastic litters our streets, our parks, our roadsides. It lines the stomachs and enmeshes the legs and beaks of wild creatures everywhere. It makes giant floating gyres of brightly coloured flotsam in the distant ocean. It makes beaches of coloured plastic sand.

Henderson Island, a tiny, uninhabited coral atoll in the South Pacific, is more than 3,000 miles from the nearest major centre of human habitation. You can’t get much more remote. Yet its beaches are littered with around 38 million bits of rubbish, almost 18 tonnes of it. It comes from everywhere there are people, and it’s 99.8 per cent plastic.

You can’t blame just one company or one product, but drinks bottles make up a mountain of waste. Coca-Cola alone produces more than 100 billion plastic bottles every year. Only a tiny proportion are reused or recycled. So where do they end up?

Tim Nunn is among those documenting the answer to that vital question.

“I wanted to turn my photography to doing something about this, not only by inspiring people to see what an incredible world we live in, but also to start people realising what an effect our everyday actions have on the ocean.” He’s an inspiring sort of guy is Tim, and he talks a lot about inspiration.

“If we can inspire people and make them love the planet,” he says, “we can start a movement that will change the world.”

• You can see more of Tim’s spectacular photos at timnunn.viewbook.com and read his inspiring blog at theplastic-project.com

I have a confession to make. I love flying. I’m not what you’d call a frequent flier. Not like my cousin Geoff, who has clocked up well over a million miles in the air commuting between business meetings all over the world. But I have flown to the US three times, to India, to north Africa and countless times to the Med and elsewhere in Europe. Which I suppose makes me normal for the nation and times I live in.

I’m not a fan of airports – particularly those big, busy ones of the shopping-mall variety. But once in the air I’m in my element. As long as I get a window seat – that’s the crucial part.

I do like to travel to unfamiliar places by train. But there’s still a special kick to be had from looking down on the land from high above. And if it’s cloudy – well, clouds are pretty cool too.

Cataloguing my photograph collection has made me realise just how drawn I am to clouds. Among which you have to count the contrails left by high-flying aircraft, which can often be extremely beautiful.

It’s strange to think how baffling and bizarre those straight, or sometimes not so straight, lines across the blue would have seemed to a skywatcher only a century ago. They seem so natural to us. Especially in this part of the world where the drone of flying engines is so much part of the background noise we scarcely really notice it.

And in a way they are natural. The atmosphere’s natural reaction to engines flying through it. Gavin Pretor-Pinney, in The Cloudspotter’s Guide, calls them “the new bastard son of the cloud family”.

I’ve seen them referred to a few times lately as “chemtrails” – which isn’t entirely wrong, since water is a chemical. And that’s what they are, like any other cloud. Condensed water vapour or ice crystals.

As Pretor-Pinney is at pains to point, though: “Aircraft exhaust contains a lot more than just water vapour. The other ingredients include carbon dioxide, oxides of sulphur and nitrogen, hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, unburned fuel and tiny particles of soot and metal. The particles have an important role in the formation of the contrail, by acting as nuclei on to which the water vapour can begin forming into droplets and crystals.”

What he doesn’t say – but which you can sometimes observe if you have a window seat near or behind a wing – is that the air pressure change which gives a plane lift can also cause condensation of the water vapour already in the atmosphere. Contrails sometimes stream from wings themselves, not just the engines on them.

But however they are formed, depending on atmospheric conditions they can puff away in a moment or hang around for hours, gradually widening and spreading into “real” clouds.

It’s not that one aero-engine produces that much vapour. Rather, it can start a chain reaction, causing the vapour in the surrounding air to condense.

These clouds look gorgeous, especially in the low sun of early morning or late evening. But they’re not quite as benign as they look.

Cloud cover has two contradictory effects on global warming. By day, it reflects the sun’s light away, keeping the earth relatively cool. By night, it acts like a blanket, keeping the earth warmer. You know this already. Cloudy nights are warmer than clear ones.

What you may not know – I didn’t until I read Pretor-Pinney’s excellent book – is the way these two effects balance out.

Thick, low clouds tend overall to have a cooling effect. While the thin, high cirrostratus such as that created – or rather triggered – by passing aircraft have a nett warming effect.

So much so that climate scientists suspect clouds that start as contrails may contribute even more to global warming than the greenhouse gases emitted directly in aeroplane exhaust.

All of which seems to have been ignored in the heated toing-and-froing over the now-approved expansion of Heathrow airport. But probably shouldn’t have been.

On the shores of Lake Athabasca in Saskatchewan, around 500 miles north of Saskatoon, the capital of the Canadian province, stands the town of Uranium City. It’s a place with a certain bleak, remote romance about it and a fascinating, though short, history. 

Beginning in the 1950s as a settlement mostly of scattered tents, it began acquiring buildings and community services in 1960. Until 1982 it had around 5,000 residents. Now it has 201. The mines which gave it its purpose – and its name – are gone. But not forgotten. 

And not really completely gone either.

One, the Gunnar Mine, on the sweetly named Crackingstone Peninsula, 16 miles from the centre of the “city”, ceased production in 1963 and was abandoned the following year. It had been worked for just eight years, first as an open-cast site, then as a deep pit. The surface buildings, including the winding-gear, were finally demolished in 2011.

The work was part of Project Cleans (Cleanup of Abandoned Northern Sites), a multi-million-dollar project “to assess and reclaim Gunnar Uranium Mine and Mill site, Lorado Uranium Mill site and 35 satellite mine sites in northern Saskatchewan”. It’s a project that still has some way to go.

In November, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission approved part of a plan by the Saskatchewan Research Council to “remediate” the mine. Or, as reported last week by the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, “to clean up 4.4 million tonnes of radioactive tailings”. 

“Tailings” are mine dumps consisting of rock and effluent generated in the processing plant. This is essentially a huge radioactive slagheap. The old mine itself is flooded and also needs a deep clean.

The estimated cost of decontaminating the site has ballooned since the project was announced. In 2006, it was expected to cost $24.6 million. The current estimate is $268m.

It’s unclear who will foot the bill. It’s become the subject of dispute between the Canadian national government and the government of Saskatchewan. 

The company that ran the mine won’t be shelling out. It went out of business long ago. Not nearly as long as the problem it left is going to be around, though.

As  nuclear chemist Ann Coxworth of the Saskatchewan Environmental Society says: “Planning for centuries ahead is never easy”. 

The present plan is for the tailings to be buried beneath “more than a metre” of earth. This, Coxworth says,  is “as good as it can get at a practical level”. Whether it’s anywhere near good enough is a moot point.

Pointing out that the site’s remoteness is no excuse for not cleaning it up, she asks: “How do you balance the cost against the moral acceptability of it?” How indeed.

And this seemingly intractable problem is in Canada, one of the most economically sound and well governed countries in the world. Imagine how much worse this sort of problem is in India, Gabon, Congo, Niger or almost anywhere else uranium is mined.

And this is just the old mine. The radioactivity in the tailings is about three times the radioactivity of the uranium that went off to the reactors. 

And what about the radioactive waste from the reactors? After a few decades it’s still thousands of times as radioactive as the uranium that went in, and it’ll be highly dangerous for thousands of years to come.  

As my brother Clive – a qualified nuclear physicist – asks: “Who do you trust to dispose of it properly? Or even to have the faintest idea of how to dispose of it properly?”

This is not just a distant Canadian (or Indian, or Congolese, or Chinese) problem. It’s very much our problem too.

And worth pondering very seriously at a time when there are finally real hopes for tidal power (see Swansea Bay). When the technology of solar power is improving so rapidly (despite governmental stalling and obstruction). And when Dutch railways have just announced that they are running entirely on wind power.
 
 
 
Trumped
 
 
Just occasionally, fake news can be brilliant. And very occasionally the TV listings pages are really worth reading. The Scottish Sunday Herald ticked all those boxes at the weekend.

TV writer Damien Love’s summary of Friday’s President Trump: The Inauguration begins: “After a long absence, The Twilight Zone returns with one of the most ambitious, expensive and controversial productions in broadcast history.”

 He adds: “The story begins in a nightmarish version of 2017 in which huge sections of the US electorate have somehow been duped into voting to make Donald Trump president. It sounds far-fetched, and it is, but as it goes on it becomes more and more chillingly plausible.”

And he concludes: “It’s a flawed piece, but a disturbing glimpse of the horrors we could stumble into, if we’re not careful.”

I really, really didn’t want to add again this week to the noise surrounding Trump. But journalistic genius deserves its due. Love’s full brilliant column can be found here.

So goodbye 2016, and good riddance. Let’s pray 2017 turns out rather better – but don’t bet your house on it.

A year ago I wrote here: “Amid all the apocalyptic gloom, there is a chance – just a chance – that 2015 will be remembered as the year things started to get better. The year the world looked over the edge into the abyss … and stepped back.”

Oh dear. I could hardly know then that the popular response to reaching the cliff’s edge would not be a mere step forward, but an enthusiastic leap.

I wasn’t predicting Brexit, or a Trump presidency, but then, who was? I did, in fact, describe Trump exactly 12 months ago as “frontrunner” – because that’s what the polls said at the time – but I never imagined that would last.

History is full of events, characters and direction changes that appear inevitable in hindsight but were unpredicted, unpredictable, beforehand. I fear 2016 was one such landmark year.

Not that I entirely believe all the talk – dangerous talk – about the rise of “populism”.

Why should racism, sexism, nationalism, war-mongering violence be any more popular, or “populist”, than more valuable values? 

I’m pretty sure they’re not. The danger is that the nasty parties, having achieved slender, even debatable, victories, have taken not only power but dominance of the public debate. To criticise, even to question, their position as victors is to be shouted down, belittled, threatened.

They claim to be “the people”, as if everyone else weren’t people. But to describe the self-styled “alt-right” (a.k.a. fascists) as populist is an insult to the populace.

It’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton, for all her considerable faults, actually got 2.9million more votes than Donald Trump. 

And that however much the government – and, shamefully, the supposed opposition – may talk of “a clear mandate” or “the will of the people”, only about a quarter of the British people actually voted to leave the European Union.

It wasn’t the people that got us into these fine messes. It was a combination of misguided leadership, misled electorates, and serious flaws of democratic process.

We are where we are. But exactly where that may be remains unclear.

Even one of the greatest of American thinkers, Noam Chomsky, appears to have had crystal ball failure. His thoughts are generally too sophisticated and complex to summarise easily, but I’ll try.

Before the US election, he said a vote for Trump would be “a vote for the end of the world” – or at least for the end of life as we know it. Irreparable damage to the biosphere, that frighteningly thin layer of soil, water and air that supports all life.

A few days after the election, Chomsky found a brighter side to look on. He suggested then that four years of Trump might prove so devastating for America in the short term that longer-term prospects for a different kind of leadership would inevitably be improved.

It may be a slender hope. It may also be the only one we have right now. But we know how inevitability has a habit of shifting its ground. And how unreliable New Year predictions are.
 
 


A 'healthy' demand for warplanes and bombs
 
 
Round about the time Boris Johnson was putting his foot in it by telling the truth about Saudi Arabia and its “proxy wars”, a business conference was taking place in Palm Beach, Florida.

In it, investors were assured that things were looking up. That the Saudis’ various adventures – and the Syrian war which has brought such horrors to Aleppo and elsewhere – were yielding what one company vice president called “indirect benefits”.

Bruce Tanner of Lockheed Martin told the Credit Suisse conference that events in Syria provided “an intangible lift because of the dynamics of that environment and our products in theatre”.

This is not a play. What he calls a theatre, the rest of us call a war zone. Which is precisely where his firm makes its profits.

Lockheed’s F-22 Raptor jet was much in evidence this past summer in the skies over East Anglia, despite its “stealth” label. Demand for it and the new F-35 is very healthy in the Middle East just now. Healthy in a business sense, that is, not in a health sense.

At the same conference, head honchos for other military manufacturers were upbeat too. Raytheon’s CEO Tom Kennedy reported “a significant uptick” for “defence solutions across the board in multiple countries in the Middle East”. 

“It’s all the turmoil they have going on,” he explained, “whether the turmoil’s occurring in Yemen, whether it’s with the Houthis, whether it’s occurring in Syria or Iraq, with Isis.”

It’s an ill wind, and all that. And it’s not just the Yanks making a killing.

We may not share the Americans’ insane attitude to guns in our own homes and streets. But we still get a significant slice of our national income from making and flogging weapons for use elsewhere.

Britain is now officially the world’s second largest arms exporter. Which is why Boris got so roundly ticked off for upsetting the Saudis, now the world’s largest arms importer.

Doesn't it just make you proud to be British, and glad that we're "taking back control"?

Remember Fukushima? It was big news in March 2011 when the nuclear plant was overwhelmed by a tsunami, causing multiple reactor meltdowns. The world’s attention has turned away since then.

But there’s still a no-go area where 150,000 people used to live. There’s still at least several decades of work ahead decommissioning the devastated plant. And the wider long-term effects are still incalculable.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company originally estimated that dismantling the plant would cost about £16million. Last week the Japanese government revised that figure to £82billion – plus another £20bn to remove radioactive topsoil, trees and buildings.

As soon as those figures were released, experts were warning that they were still over-optimistic. But all this playing with numbers is really just evidence of our obsession with money ahead of anything that actually matters.

As science journalist Madhusree Mukerjee says: “I find it hard to believe that this plant can be cleaned up at all, no matter how much they spend on it.

“The molten cores will be too dangerous to get near to for half a century at least. Plus, Japan has no repository for high-level nuclear waste, and given the earthquake danger, it is unlikely to ever have one.

“All that contaminated topsoil – where will they put it? It just sits around in plastic bags and gets dispersed again each time there is a typhoon.”

Meanwhile, closer to home, there’s this news, which was not as widely published as it might have been.
Since 2000, convoys carrying nuclear weapons along UK roads have had 180 “mishaps and incidents”, including collisions, breakdowns and brake failures.

Not a lot of people know that. The fact that you now do is just one reason to be grateful for the Freedom of Information Act.

You may think I’m being ignorant or ingenuous here in linking a story about nuclear power with one about nuclear weapons – but I’m not. The two are inextricably linked, and not just by the dangers that apply to both.

There is really no plausible reason to invest in nuclear energy other than its covert role in making material for weapons. Which is why if we’re to calculate the true cost of Trident renewal, we should also factor in the enormous sums the government seems willing to pour into Hinkley, Bradwell and Sizewell.

Though that, of course, is to repeat that potentially catastrophic error of trying to put a cash value on things too big and dangerous to be measured in terms of mere finance.

Power vacuums. Power generation. Power to the people – or against the people, or over the people. When you look at it from a few different angles, it begins to seem power is at the heart of most of humanity’s problems. As well as being crucial to any hope of resolving them.

Has a reliable way of selecting a good government ever been devised? And, in the rare case of good government being achieved, is there any way of keeping it on the right course?

A quick look round the corridors of power across the world right now might make you doubt it. Then again, I don’t think right now is anything special. Pick any time and place in history and your chance of landing on an unequivocally sound government is pretty slim.

It’s not just that there may be something dodgy about those who seek power. There are decent and honourable reasons for wanting to call the shots, but there are also plenty of less worthy motivations. The worthy may or may not be outnumbered, but they are sadly likely to be outplayed by the less scrupulous.

And then, as they say, power corrupts. A saying which is true of more kinds of power than the purely political sort.
Financial power may be the greatest corrupter – or lure to the already corrupt – of all. And as for the kind of power you hook up to when you turn your key in the ignition or insert your three-pin plug in the wall-socket…

The Amazon rainforest is under threat. We all know this by now, and we probably all know several good reasons why it’s a bad thing. But what power do we have to save it?

The forest may be the lungs of the Earth, but there are powerful predators wanting to take chunks out of it.

The Brazilian government is planning right now to grant permission for 42 massive dams to be built right through the heart of the forest. What for? Well, power of course.

Power to drive an increasingly electricity-dependent society. And, inevitably, the power of big global business cash.
Never mind that flooding the forest will drown vast numbers of already endangered animals and plantlife. And deprive the survivors of livable habitat.

With each dam submerging vast areas of rainforest under deep water, hundreds if not thousands of monkeys, tapirs, anteaters and birds could perish, pushing precious species closer to the brink of extinction. 

Never mind that the flooding will displace thousands of people who won’t benefit in any way from all that generated power. Though it may well force them into dependency, the newest and poorest members of a modern society they’d be better off not knowing or understanding.

That’s progress for you. That’s power.

The building of just one dam means the destruction of hundreds of square miles of rainforest. The recently-completed Belo Monte dam wiped out huge areas of forest, then failed to produce anywhere near its power targets. Once built, it wasn’t fit for purpose. But the damage done cannot be reversed.

Another 42 dams adds up to a catastrophic level of devastation. A catastrophe not just for the indigenous people and the native wildlife, but for the world.

And in a way it’s not fair to blame the Brazilian government too much. They, after all, like governments everywhere, are in the power of global corporations.

Which is to say, governed by market forces. Except that the term “market forces” is a weaselly way of making it sound like something natural, something inevitable.

Taking the spotlight off the powerful people who call the shots. The faceless men (they’re mostly men) in international boardrooms who care a lot about their own money – their own power – and not at all about the jaguar, the toucan, the tapir, the princess flower or the forest people.
 
 
​
A spirit-crushing prospect for the environment 

Brexit, we keep being told, means Brexit. Which means what, exactly?

I’m fairly sure nobody voted for a concerted attack on the environment. But among many things we stand to lose by leaving the EU are decades of hard-won progress on clean water, clean air and wildlife habitat.

One pro-Brexit Tory, George Eustice, called European nature protections “spirit-crushing”. Which is itself a pretty spirit-crushing thought.

From the day of the vote, all kinds of undesirables have taken it as a licence to emerge from the cupboard. We’ve heard about the racists, we’ve heard about those who want to rid us of human rights and decent working conditions. Now it seems there’s even a climate sceptic group called “Clexit” that wants to abandon last year’s Paris agreement on greenhouse gas emissions.

You’d have thought by now that the climate-change denier would have gone the same way as the flat-earther. Except for one thing. There’s no money in claiming the world’s flat.

I am not religious. In fact I distrust religion – every religion I know of – for its essential closed-mindedness. The insistence on “God-given truth” – an untested and untestable version of reality that you are supposed to swallow, not just without evidence, but without the possibility of evidence.

I value the human spirit of inquiry – call it science, if you will – that religion cuts off by demanding you accept its own version of things without question. The very basis of “faith” is to prevent the common folk from questioning those above them, those who tell them what to believe and what to do.

There are, of course, a great many good Christians – and good Muslims, good Jews, good Hindus and the rest – whose behaviour towards their fellow beings I couldn’t fault. There are also many, and always have been, who use their religion as a pretext for appalling intolerance, appalling behaviour. Those known as Islamic State, or Isis, may be disowned by most Muslims – just as most Christians today would disown the Spanish Inquisition – but they are hardly the first to claim religion as a justification for murder.

The way much of the British media now demonises Islam is pretty much the way much of Britain once regarded Roman Catholics. My own grandmother, no more religious than I am, reserved her deepest scorn for Catholicism. In her view the Pope, whoever happened to hold that title at the time, was one of the most dangerous people in the world. For any one person to prescribe how a fifth of the world’s population should think and act is a scary thought. The idea that that person is supposedly “infallible” doesn’t make it any less so.

Given all this, it’s something of a surprise to find myself joining the present Pope’s fan club. But it’s hard not to celebrate a man who uses all that power and influence to spread such a humane and intelligent message.

His encyclical Laudato si was the most important statement of his pontificate so far.

Beyond mere religion, it addresses the very future of human life on Earth.

Neatly and knowledgeably its swats aside those who – either through wishful thinking or cynically – deny all the evidence of climate change. Perhaps surprisingly, but entirely appropriately, it defines the issue as a moral one.


It calls for humanity to work together urgently to protect “our common home” and abandon the “throwaway culture” dominating modern life.

And it goes right to the heart of the matter when it calls on politicians to abandon short-term thinking for the long-term good of all.

The Pope’s question to world leaders is one they should all ask themselves urgently – and answer honestly: “What would induce anyone, at this stage, to hold on to power only to be remembered for their inability to take action when it was urgent and necessary to do so?”

And the message to his millions of Twitter followers was succinct: “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth.”

A Pope who communicates with his flock via Twitter is an almost surreal idea in itself, but that’s a lot less important than what he says.

Those followers are no doubt mostly Catholics, but the Pope is rightly keen for this particular message to be heard more widely.

Those who have applauded include a number of (presumably non-religious) leading scientists.
As Prof Chris Rapley, of University College London, said: “The Pope’s message underscores a profoundly important insight, all too often missed – that despite having been revealed by science, climate change is not really an issue about science. It’s an issue about what sort of a world we want to live in.”

It’s worth asking what sort of world the British Government wants to live in. Axing subsidies for wind farms and preparing to force fracking on communities that don’t want it hardly back up David Cameron’s stated intention to lead the “greenest Government ever”.

As a real Green – MP Caroline Lucas – put it: “The signals given out by the Pope and our Government couldn’t have been more different. One talks of hope and the chance to rebuild a better world, the other continues to promote energy policies far better suited to the last century.”

I’m not sure those policies would really have been suitable in any century, but she has a point.

So has the man who said this: “It is clear that this Pope is very courageous. He is not a politician. He is not a diplomat. He is someone who is willing to say what others are afraid to say.” OK, the words are those of one of Pope Francis’s key advisers, Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, who can hardly be expected to be impartial. But he happens to be right.

My only unease about Pope Francis’s powerful statement is this: if one man can save the world, what could a different sort of man do in the same position? A climate-change denier, for instance?
 

The virtuoso solo part in today’s dawn chorus was taken by a songthrush, the distinctive repetition of each phrase underlining the variety of musical invention. With such a bravura performance right outside your window you can’t resent being awake at an unconventional time.

The trees are right now wearing their brightest, most glorious green. As I write, somewhere in all that foliage a chaffinch is trilling its insistent call-sign. A pair of great tits are toing and froing very busily, foraging for tasty morsels to bring back to their young family in the nesting-box under my windowsill.

On the lawn below, two young blackbirds are harassing their parents to keep feeding them. Though they are already as big as the adult pair, the youngsters still have the distinctive “feed-me” yellow stripes on the side of their bills.

The grape hyacinths and wild primroses that enjoyed their best spring for many years have now yielded pride of place to the forget-me-nots along the footpath to my door.

The air is thick with the aroma of hawthorn blossom, not inaptly known as mayflower. Another few days should bring the annual bombardment of that gorgeously weird winged thing the maybug, aka cockchafer, spang beetle or – locally and most colourfully – billywitch.

All this vibrancy of life should surely lift the dullest spirit. It puts our parochial and political woes in perspective. Always look on the bright side and all that.

But then there’s the prediction that a sixth of all species of life on earth will be extinct by the end of the century.

It would be better for most of the rest if our species was one of those facing annihilation. And there are several plausible scenarios which suggest we could be.


If we wipe out the bees, for example, they might well take us with them.

A nuclear Armageddon is no less likely now than it was 50-odd years ago when it was the world’s biggest worry. If it were to happen, that forecast of a sixth of all species would surely prove to be a major under-estimate.

But never mind. I’m sure there’ll be another dawn chorus to listen to tomorrow.
 
 
****
 
 
I wanted to avoid writing about politics this week, but I just have to share my mixed feelings about Chuka Umunna’s early withdrawal from the contest to become Labour leader.

Partly it’s one of relief. I handed in my party card years ago, but I still believe British politics needs a strong Labour Party. More crucially, it needs a Labour Party that remains true to its core values, its very reason for being. Or, rather, that rediscovers those things.

It says a lot about Umunna that he was Tony Blair’s preferred candidate for the leadership.

It was under Blair that Labour became simply another Tory party. A friend of big business, not the corner shop. Of the corporate employer, not the struggling employee.

For a while the party still called “Labour” was a more successful Tory party than the real one. Even were Umunna to recreate that success, one would have to wonder what would be the point. Shiny careers for a few shiny career politicians and that’s about it.

But I feel sorry for Umunna. And the apparent reason he changed his mind is troubling.

Yes, democracy needs the scrutiny of a free press. But for Umunna’s family – his girlfriend, his mother – to face harassment, intrusion and innuendo so strongly and so soon that he felt compelled to step aside reflects a lot worse on my profession than on his.
 
 
****
 
 
I always felt stories of the carefully fabricated cult status built for North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un should be taken with a pinch of salt. A country that cuts itself off from the world gives itself great scope for propaganda – but it also allows for a lot of propaganda about that propaganda.

Russia, however, is a different kettle of fish. Mutual distrust between Moscow and the West may be at a post-Communist peak, but there are plenty of international journalists in Russia. Plenty of communication in both directions through TV, the internet and other media.

So we really have to believe the most surreal news story of the past week – the eight goals scored by President Vladimir Putin in an exhibition ice hockey game to mark VE Day. Heck, I’ve seen the video.

Just to stay upright and mobile on the ice is a feat for a 62-year-old – even one who rides horses topless and hauls ancient archaeological relics out of the sea with his bare hands.

One can only speculate what other world leaders may feel obliged to do to compete.

Turning out in an NBA basketball match would obviously be a thrill for Barack Obama.

François Hollande should trade in his moped for a proper bike and ride the Tour de France.

I could see Angela Merkel in Germany’s synchronised swimming squad.

And David Cameron could bang in a few goals for West Ham. Or Aston Villa.