greenpeace

Since the Big If pledge launched in March, when Age of Stupid actor Pete Postletwaite promised the UK Energy and Climate Change minister Ed Miliband that he would return his OBE if the government gave the go-ahead for a new coal power station Kingsnorth, thousands of people have joined him in making pledges of their own.

Greenpeace UK has been a core member of the Big If coalition from the start, together with a wide range of other organisations including the RSPB, World Development Movement, Oxfam and the Women's Institute. Because if Kingsnorth and the other 10 plants planned to follow it get built, then we'll have next to no chance of meeting our CO2 reduction targets and reining in runaway climate change.

Yay - Rex Weyler's latest Deep Green column has arrived!

Rex Weyler was a director of the original Greenpeace Foundation, the editor of the organisation’s first newsletter, and a cofounder of Greenpeace International in 1979. He was a photographer and reporter on the early Greenpeace whale and seal campaigns, and has written one of the best and most comprehensive histories of the organisation, Greenpeace (Raincoast, 2004). His book, Blood of the Land, a history of the American Indian Movement, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. “Deep Green” is Rex’s monthly column, reflecting on the roots of activism, environmentalism, and Greenpeace’s past, present, and future. The opinions here are his own.

Since the late Pleistocene, 100,000 years ago, when a few thousand Homo sapiens poked around Africa, Asia, and the Mediterranean, human population has doubled 22 times. We have one more such doubling left, and that's it. Human population will likely level off at 10 to 14 billion sometime around 2100, exceeding the Earth's carrying capacity. Mass human starvations are already underway in degraded environments.