For those of you not in the know or deliberately abstaining from the joke that is our national news service, today the Lords of the land (via their Westminster mouthpiece) overturned Lancashire County Council’s planning decision to reject Fracking.

Honestly, my biggest reaction at this news is for the community of people who’ve worked so hard to first educate themselves, then expend a ridiculous amount of energy informing others, marching, singing, campaigning, drumming, researching, leafleting, camping (!) , drawing, writing, cataloging, stall-manning, door-knocking and endless conversations with others along the way… and all the usual human mess that comes with being part of a wider movement of diverse people.

You are all brilliant and that camaraderie is the silver lining of this total farce.

That and people realizing and accepting that #Democracy is just a bullshit word.

Love to all my friends who are absorbing this news and preparing…

The sordid story of the geology professor, the fracking company, the old Etonian and the Tory Party fundraiser

When retiredgeophysics professor Dr David Smythe wrote a highly technicalacademic papercritical of fracking processes, he expected the usual questioning from academic colleagues that goes with peer reviewed academic publications.

What he didn’t expect was to see his academic reputation smeared in two national newspapers.

The Telegraph and the Daily Mail – not publications normally interested inmicrite layers of subsurface geology – both ran bizarre smear stories claiming Smythe had ‘fabricated’ his qualifications.

The ‘fabrications’ boiled down to the non-storythat on his retirement, Smythe had not renewed his subscriptions to membership of the Geological Society.

Dr Smythe was even more surprised to see a colleague from his alma mater Glasgow University – a prof Paul Younger – widely quoted in the newspaper articles, fiercely criticising him for supposedly ‘lying’ about his…

As a naive Canadian kid, I grew up in a dream, where nuclear weapons seemed either a climactic boost to a movie’s plot or horror stories of the past. Never in 25 years had I imagined that I would complacently support weapons of mass destruction – until I moved to the UK.

If you follow UK politics, you’ll notice quickly that there is huge debate about funding public amenities like the National Health Services (dramatically underfunded & being privatised without public consent) and University tuition (once ensured by government grants as universal free higher education & now on the steady rise). You hear so often that the UK just doesn’t have the funding to support these vital public institutions, but you don’t often hear where your taxes end up.

Imagine my reaction when I found out that UK tax payers – including myself – actually subsidize maintenance of the Trident…

As an ecologist working several decades in various environmental sectors, I will say that I have come to learn that ecological illiteracy is not an accident, it could be considered as a successful form of social engineering that is very convenient for the current greed driven oligarchy.

We were not born ecologically illiterate, a child instinctively knows to care for animals and the environment and often a toddler marvels at every blade of grass and insect it encounters, it is usually when a child is shown or taught cruelty that a child starts to mimic adults by example and not respecting its fellow creatures or environment.

Biophilia is an instinct we were born with, an inner sense of feeling good and being uplifted by nature. However systematic deprogramming in  humans has turned us into good capitalists and consumers but appalling environmental protectors, making us ignorant of ecology and how…