Month: July 2019

Launched in 2007, Google Street View has given us an incredible way to see the world. It allows us to scroll through the neighborhood where you grew up or become a virtual pedestrian throughout most parts of the globe.

It’s also a time machine of sorts, allowing us to go back and see places before the most recent photographs were taken. Most of the photography is done by car, but some areas are captured by snowmobile, boat, underwater apparatus, and on foot.

Google Street View has also gone into space, giving us photos of the International Space Station.

As a byproduct of photographing the world, Google Street View has also inadvertently taken some fun photos of the animal kingdom. Here, we take a look at some of the funniest and/or perfectly-timed animal photos caught by Google Street View.

1.) Jumping jack rabbit!

2.) It’s like Hitchcock’s “The Birds”

3.) “Hey guys, wait up!”

4.) “Usually, my head is in the sand.”

5.) Cat nap

6.) “Watch where you’re going!”

7.) “I gotta eat fewer treats!”

8.) What street was this taken on?

9.) Bust your hump all day and you deserve some down time

10.) The moose is loose!

12.) The wandering burro

13.) “The Birds Part 2”

14.) “I’m ready for my close-up”

15.) You can lead a horse to water…

16.) A private moment

17.) Just monkeying around

18.) “Hi guys!”

 

 

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More and more Americans are biking to work these days.

According to a study by the Accessibility Observatory at the University of Minnesota, the number of Americans who commute to work on their bicycles is up 22 percent over the past nine years.

“Though biking is used for less than one percent of commuting trips in the United States, biking infrastructure investments are much more cost-effective at providing access to jobs than infrastructure investments to support automobiles,” Andrew Owen, director of the Observatory, told the University of Minnesota.

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The rise in American cyclist commuters is good news. “Bike commuting is a cost-effective, healthy, and environmentally sustainable alternative to being stuck in traffic,” Owen said.

However, the U.S. still has a long way to go to catch up to Europe, where commuting to work on a bicycle is very common. For example, in the U.S. 0.6 percent of commuters go to work on a bike, whereas in Copenhagen, Denmark, a whopping 37 percent of people take a bike to work.

The layout of U.S. and European cities has a lot to do with the differences in biking populations. Much of the U.S. was built with cars in mind, but in Europe, most major cities sprang up centuries before cars were even a consideration.

Poland recently introduced some beautiful glow-in-the-dark bike lanes in the town of Lidzbark Warminski. Created by TPA Instytut Badan Technicznych, they’re lit completely by solar power so cyclists can see where they’re going when the sun goes down, and more importantly, drivers can see them. 

“The material we used for the track gives light for over ten hours. That means the road can radiate throughout the whole night and reaccumulate light the following day,” Igor Ruttmar from TPA told Civil Engineer.

The Polish bike lanes aren’t the first of their kind in Europe. In 2014, artist Daan Roosegaarde, designed self-illuminated bike lanes based on the painting “Starry Night” by painter Vincent van Gogh. The artist was a resident of the region back in 1883. 

“The best programmers are actively leaving the country,” Pyotr, the head of a St Petersburg IT start-up, tells me.

“Many major western companies left Russia long ago. Start-ups and investors have left because of the political and economic situation. Even organisations with roots in Russia have repositioned themselves towards western projects.”

Today, Russia’s digital sector is working at half strength. Recent “sovereign internet” legislation could weaken its position further. The law’s authors believe it will ensure the Russian internet’s “safe and sustainable operation” in case of external “threat”.

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But if the law goes through, Russia’s tech businesses will be face a threat from within – locked behind an iron firewall, the country’s IT sector may just simply fade away.

Digital isolation

The new law is not aimed at maintaining the smooth functioning of the internet in Russia, but controlling information. The draft bill proposes a number of key elements:

• Roskomnadzor (RKN), Russia’s Federal Supervision Agency for Information Technologies and Communications, will hold a register of Internet Exchange Points, which will mean that operators may only use data centres that are under its control;
• Operators must install equipment “to counteract threats to reliability”, which will help pinpoint sources of traffic and to which Roskomnadzor will have authorisation control;
• After this equipment is installed, Roskomnadzor will be able, “in case of threats” (as defined by the agency itself), to take centralised control of networks;
• Operators and service providers must attend training sessions on guaranteeing internet functionality, which will lead to official interventions;
• Operators will need to report any use by them of trans-border networks (i.e. networks crossing state frontiers), justify the necessity of this use and record all the traffic passing through them;
• Roskomnadzor is initiating the creation of a national domain name system, where decisions will be taken unilaterally, from the top down (a special NGO will be set up for this purpose).

Each of these points throws up questions. How will the system work? Who will be responsible for what? Who will provide the bulk of the finance? The only thing that is clear is that isolating the Runet will be expensive and murky. There has as yet been little discussion of what will be paid by businesses and what by users, but it’s likely that private providers and operators will bear the brunt of the cost.

IT companies and specialists will probably have three notional choices: to accept Roskomnadzor’s demands and resolve bureaucratic issues in compliance with the limitations it has imposed; to create alternative networks and organise work on an “ad hoc” basis; or to physically move capacity outside the “sovereign” internet.

Internet blocking

The situation is obviously reminiscent of China’s “Golden Shield” internet project, otherwise known as "The Great Firewall of China”. China’s information security programme has been in development since 1993, and has been operating since 2003. Today, China’s internet is an independent economic space regulated by many elements: infrastructure, communication, filtration and even self-censorship. The project’s political and ideological aspects were aimed at creating new norms of maintaining content security, restricting access to the free expanse of communication and global services and keeping track of criticism of the regime.

These two decades of regulated development have given the Chinese internet its own practices, products and structures. There is an equivalent, or even a more relevant localised version, of practically every global service. China’s information and communication technology market is fully competitive on a global level, as well as providing for local demand. And this totalitarian regime has quite quickly become the norm for users, making them citizens of their powerful national internet.

The same kind of development is, however, not possible in the Russian context. It’s not a question of a potential shortfall in financial, technological and human resources. It’s more the fact that over the last 20 years, Runet users have enjoyed free and unlimited access to the web, without perceptible barriers, filters or restrictions. Back in 2012, Russia occupied 30th place in the Free Internet ratings, while in 2017 it had already sunk to 50th place.

Today, any attempt to impose restrictions, as well as promoting the idea of a “good user” as a “good citizen”, provokes confusion and criticism in Russia. But real monitoring and regulatory actions will become a training ground for creativity around “how to avoid blocking”. Russia’s project of a “sovereign internet” is doomed to failure, even when presented as an “information security” measure.

In practice, the Runet isolation project may take a number of forms, depending on the level of threat to the everyday work of developers.

Today, we can observe the echoes of the partial blocking of resources that was particularly obvious on the wave of last April’s war between Roskomnadzor and the Telegram messenger app. Technical glitches on the first evening brought down hundreds of thousands of websites, including social media sites Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and Twitter. And although the problem was quickly fixed, instructions momentarily appeared on the internet, instructing users on how to avoid Roskomnadzor blacklists and even running short courses on surviving digital isolation. Professional communities and savvy users can easily avoid the blocks; they are more likely to affect ordinary users and impinge on the Russian audience’s experience of the web.

While everyone waits for further details, which the Russian government should announce by November 2019, I discussed the law and its possible consequences with representatives of Russia’s IT sector.

This turned out to be far from simple: the news about the Runet going it alone is either not taken seriously or completely ignored. Only a few IT specialists agreed to share their thoughts, and they all requested anonymity – this means that their reflections will be general. These sources work both for Russian and international companies engaged in the Russian market, and are involved in software design for both business and home use.

The price of isolation

The developers I talked to believe that problems with Russia’s “sovereign internet” law will come at the technical input stage, especially bearing in mind the fact that similar, smaller initiatives haven’t yet been implemented completely – such as the “Yarovaya Law”, SORM telecommunications interception and site blocking.

Experiments with individual companies, including Yandex, have confirmed that there are no technological fixes that can guarantee the sustainable operation of an internet network under official control. Deep filtration systems (DPI), which the law proposes to use to control internet traffic, have a considerable slowing down effect on speed, which comes at a cost to everyone using the web – both individual users and businesses.

Other IT specialists note that the process requires not just technical, but also organisational measures. In practice, this means that for the “sovereign internet” project to be completed, a new scheme of relations and responsibilities between the large number of state subcontractors and the manufacturers of the relevant systems needs to be developed. This is where the companies that will benefit from a “sovereign internet” come from (e.g. software and hardware producers), but also those who will directly lose out (such as internet operators). And this doesn’t even include the indirect costs, which are impossible to estimate at present.

The specialists whom I talked to stress that just about anything can happen to a project between its outset and conclusion. For example, if the conditions under which measures “to counteract threats to reliability” are supposed to be used remain the same (e.g. in extreme circumstances), then no one will suffer from these measures. The imagined “master switch” to turn off Russia’s internet could remain nothing more than a stage prop.

Developers admit, however, that the system will probably be used for regulatory and monitoring functions, including the monitoring of civic activity. We can now see the genesis of this project in Roskomnadzor’s blacklists and legal measures designed to limit speech, such as Russia’s recent law on disrespecting state authorities. Against the background of these specific initiatives, the potential effect of Runet’s isolation depends on political willpower: either the project will limit itself to large providers and the development of a “secure infrastructure”, or will be implemented on a wide scale, which will definitely turn into an ideological project.

A conflict of ideologies

The “Runet” bill is being developed as part of the Russian state’s “digital economy” programme, introduced as a priority in 2017. But the idea of a “sovereign internet” contravenes this policy by definition, since a digital economy is closely connected with cross-border links and assumes freedom of communication.

Conversations about preparations to isolate the Runet, however, have been happening since 2006-2007, and even then experts’ assessments excluded the likelihood of a complete shutdown of the Russian internet “due to external threats”. The political situation, teams from relevant ministries and strategic policy directions have changed – and digital sovereignty has only now made it on to the agenda.

The ideological element of the bill has been received ambiguously, mostly in terms of similar situations and examples, from the most neutral to the more critical. Some people are comparing it with the Mir card payment system introduced in 2017, designed to be an alternative to the globally used SWIFT in case Russia lost access. Now Mir (“World”) has become the dominant payment system for public sector organisations in Russia, but this is no longer seen as an issue – all other cards can be used as well.

A more serious ideological issue is the Telegram app and the attempts to block it. Here, professional consensus is also lacking: some people see these attempts as stupid and pathetic, while others have welcomed the technical facilities used by Roskomnadzor. There are also some who see this as a political standoff that should have been technically won by the messenger company. Yet the Telegram case demonstrated two important aspects of the IT world. First, any badly designed technical restriction contains a weakness that specialists will notice and use to their advantage. Second, the professional community will show solidarity in order to protect its freedoms and spaces, even if that means teaching users to set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network).

Finally, the example of the Chinese internet is becoming increasingly politicised. It operates almost completely within a firewall – an inter-connected screen that prevents free exchange of traffic. And although it’s not clear how this was developed technically, even the Russian-language internet is full of recommendations on how to get round it. China’s internet has been able to work efficiently thanks to a highly developed internal market and high digital capacity, not to mention exceptionally loyal developers who don’t want to mix business with politics.

China’s isolated internet is part of a massive totalitarian project which, among other things, includes a system of total surveillance and social status on the basis of personal data. When the founder of a Chinese start-up, which developed facial recognition technology that went on to be used by government agencies, was asked about the consequences of his work, he replied: “We aren’t running so far ahead so as to find out whether AI will be in conflict with humans. We’re just trying to earn money.” Russian designers partly understand and even sometimes justify this attitude, but still, their professionalisation took place in a period of free internet access.

Relocating behind the firewall

Putting the draft law into practice might affect the development of Russia’s IT market, which grew out of multinational cooperation and isn’t limited by state boundaries.

In the Russian segment of the internet, partial blocks have become the norm over the last few years, which is no surprise. The general trend towards state control of the internet’s free space still, however, angers people. A protest against the draft law took place back in March, and since the news of its progress in April even staff at IT companies have been criticising various aspects of it. For the moment, its effects are very minor and have barely touched daily lives and professional activities, and while we can avoid them fairly easily, isolation isn’t a serious danger.

Nonetheless, the IT sector assumes constant free access to information and an absence of hard limits to the spread of its developments. But for Russia’s IT-sector, isolation would risk its intellectual and technical resources and hence its IT reputation on a global level.

Some people working in the area suggest that the bill will have little impact on the current labour market, as it won’t involve changes in technology, or that its effect will be minimal. Others believe that this initiative will increase professional mobility and migration – a natural reaction on the part of IT specialists to the existing restrictions and confusion.

According to a development engineer at one Russian company, “programmers have the most freedom in the sector, but Western companies headhunt our specialists for their high qualifications and relatively low recruitment costs”.

Depending on the extent of the barriers that will be imposed, specialists will also look at their own outgoings to see how the restrictions will affect them personally or directly obstruct their professional lives. Russia already suffered an IT brain drain in 2012-2014, and the isolation of the Runet might be the next significant factor in this trend. On the other hand, new market niches may emerge, connected with the maintenance of the equipment needed for the operation of the upcoming changes. The Runet issue could lead to lifestyle choices – to leave or to stay: the situation is unstable and unpredictable in general.

Major companies operating in Russia, such as DataArt, EPAM, SAP, JetBrains and Wrike are now busy opening offices in other countries and are happy to relocate their workforce out of Russia. This way, they can hope to not only retain workplaces for their staff, helping them move, but also maintain their market position and reputation.

As a result, some professionals will choose internal “migration” within their companies and some will leave to look for more freedom and better working conditions elsewhere, but the greater part will stay where they are. For them, their next choice will hang on the development of the IT sector itself: isolated from global development, it can only rely on its own capacity and resources, which are pretty limited in Russia. We may reasonably expect stagnation in Russia’s IT sector – extremely undesirable in a developing digital economy.

Sat on the edge of the street, people by the hundreds walk by without acknowledgement, even eye contact. Whilst much attention is given to loneliness in the elderly (as witnessed in much of the recent outcry over the BBC’s scrapping of free licence fees for over-75’s), why is there not more attention given to the issue of loneliness in the homeless community?

77% of homeless people often or sometimes feel lonely, according to a survey undertaken by Crisis in 2015. That’s more than three times the level of loneliness amongst the middle-aged and older.

The effect of this loneliness may be small at first but can turn into social isolation which, in turn, can lead towards social exclusion. Excluded from mainstream social networks, it becomes harder and harder to get housing and find gainful employment.

One solution is simple – treat the homeless as we would like to be treated, as human beings with value. Eye contact, a smile, a handshake – take the time to talk to someone who is homeless, and you may be surprised by the stories they have to tell and what you may learn. I was.

From a Soviet-era prison to the streets of Britain

I first met Rupi whilst surveying the homeless at Catching Lives, a homeless daycentre and service provider in Canterbury, Kent. Pacing awkwardly, survey and clipboard in hand, I spot a man in a leather jacket at one of the tables lining the main communal room. I approach and start my usual pitch: I’m a student doing some research into voting in the homeless community. I ask for three minutes of his time.

The man looks up, smiles and asks for the question to be repeated. Sensing the Francophone accent, we start talking excitedly in French where I learn that he grew up in Romania but ended up in Belgium as a political refugee before coming to the UK. Eager to find out more, we exchange numbers and names. His – Rupi Gabor.

Three weeks later, we meet in the picturesque garden of Café St. Pierre on Canterbury High Street. Armed with a coffee each, Rupi begins: “I was born in a city that has no link to my name or my origins. My given name has Indian origins whereas my family name is Hungarian, Transylvanian, and I was born near the Black sea, in Constanta. At least that’s what my documents say. When it comes to my origins, my family, that is a mystery I am yet to resolve. I hope to one day. I grew up in an orphanage on the other side of Romania, in a place close to Timisoara called Gavojdia.”

Growing up in the 1970s and 80s in communist Romania, however, was particularly difficult for Rupi. “There was a lot of discrimination with the name I have and the way I look, being of Hungarian, perhaps Romani traveller origins. I’m not entirely sure. In any case, I was a foreigner and, in those days, with Ceaușescu (communist leader and dictator of Romania from 1965 to 1989) that was like being a martian. People looked at me weirdly and treated me differently. This discrimination, as well as my time under this dictatorship, still affects me today.”

Leaving school in February 1989, Rupi found himself, as many do at that age, wondering what next. “I’d meet my friends in the park and we would talk politics, how there is nothing to do in Gavojdia, no opportunities. But at the time, if the police saw a group of men meeting together in public, they could put you in prison. The police would grab you, give you a smack in the head with a truncheon; democratisers they called them.”

Rupi managed to eventually find a job in a factory but the work was hard and poorly paid. He ended up on the streets and, in an effort to improve his life, fled with two friends across the border. “But we were caught and brought to a room in the border office. The border police gave me an old phone and told me to put the handset to my ear and say, ‘I’m sorry for betraying my country.’ This was a long sentence because, at the same time, they would send electric shocks. I had to say it several times and I have come to accept now that this was torture.” What followed, however, was worse. Rupi was sent to prison for one year.

It was a tough time for Rupi, both mentally and physically. For one, political prisoners (like Rupi) were separated and afforded worse conditions than their criminal counterparts; “they were allowed outside in the yard. Us, no. Also, we had to remain silent at all times, couldn’t speak to one another. If we did, we were punished, beaten. This experience of not being able to speak without punishment affected me quite a lot. For some time afterwards, I couldn’t speak or respond to people. It’s a very bizarre experience.”

Day-to-day life was tough; “I got in trouble, beaten around 3 times a day. They would let me out of my cell to clean the corridors; ‘quicker, quicker, quicker’, they would say. I did have one familiar face though, a friend from the orphanage. He was bigger than me and had done military service where he was a chef. So, when he was put in prison, he was assigned to the kitchens. He was all good, he had food,” Rupi recalls. “I remember that he came to see me once or twice and gave me a block of polenta.”

Rupi only spent a couple of months in prison in the end as the revolution of 1989 swept across Eastern Europe. Before anyone could be liberated, though, the 500 or so political prisoners alongside Rupi were, he explains, “put into groups of 50. I was in group 3 and we were marched towards the prison doors. Group 1 went out and were shot by firing squad.” Why? Because they were so-called ‘enemies of communism’ or ‘revolutionaries’ with links to those who were busy sparking a revolution.

In the end, Rupi escaped with his life as the military police stormed the prison just in time. Rupi asserts that “if it wasn’t for this (the revolution), I would have died. It was then that I started believing in God.”

Rupi returned home to Gavojdia, but found that there was no work for a former prisoner. Instead, he tried, this time successfully, to cross the border towards the West in the search of a better life. Rupi recalls that it took him and two friends over two months to make it to Germany. 28 years later and he is now in the UK and hopes to get his lorry driving licence.

At the start of the interview, Rupi explained, “I have a lot to say, a lot to get out because, you see, I’m all alone, not a big social life.” Later on he talked about where we had first met, Catching Lives and how he goes there to meet people, to have a chat. But not every homeless person will have the same access to services like this, amidst rising homelessness and dwindling funds for service providers.

There is something we can do though. Why not have a chat, exchange a friendly nod or a handshake with a homeless person the next time you are walking to work. You might talk to Rupi, someone else with a story to tell, dramatic or otherwise. But you will be talking to a human being, one who may feel lonely or rejected from society. The homeless are often written off as the drunk, drugged and mentally ill but in truth there’s a rich tapestry of human experience that deserves to be looked in the eye, talked and listened to. Why not start now?

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‘I'm beginning to comprehend, I think, some of the reasons for Hitler’s astounding success. Borrowing a chapter from the Roman church, he is restoring pageantry and colour and mysticism to the drab lives of twentieth-century Germans.’ So wrote William Shirer in his famous Berlin Diary, commenting on the Nuremberg Rally of 1934.

He continued: ‘This morning’s opening meeting in the Luitpold Hall on the outskirts of Nuremberg was more than a gorgeous show; it also had something of the mysticism and religious fervour of an Easter or Christmas Mass in a great Gothic cathedral.’ Shirer went on to describe how the packed hall was electrified when the band played the Badenweiler March, music only used for Hitler’s entrances. As Hitler arrived, along with other leading Nazis, he was met by saluting followers. Kleig lamps were used to dazzle the stage where he then sat, surrounded by a hundred party officials and army and navy officers. As the music died down, Rudolf Hess read out the names of Nazi ‘martyrs’, those who had died fighting for the movement, while behind the assembled men was the ‘blood flag’ that had been paraded in the streets of Munich on the day of the failed putsch of 1923.

As Shirer concluded, ‘In such an atmosphere no wonder, then, that every word dropped by Hitler seemed like an inspired Word from on high. Man’s – or at least the German’s – critical faculty is swept away at such moments, and every lie pronounced is accepted as high truth itself.’

This powerful scene from the early days of the Third Reich makes us consider how faith and politics are blurred by fascism. The creation of new symbols and rituals to evoke belief in a higher cause are central to the critical concept familiar to many historians of fascism and communism, ‘political religion’. This term has been prevalent in fascism studies for at least two decades, and has a much longer history rooted in contemporary responses to interwar fascism itself.

For its modern advocates, especially Emilio Gentile, political religion explains how fascism was more than a top-down form of domination, and drew out genuine belief from wide sectors of society that lived under fascist regimes or were attracted to fascist movements. The term has also found new relevance for those thinking about the ways evocations of faith in something higher is important for understanding extreme ideologies and regimes. In recent times, the political religion concept has been used to examine a diverse range of more contemporary phenomena,from ISIS to the Christian Identity movement, as well as American neo-Nazi organisations such as the National Alliance, and it has even been used to characterise the ideology of Juche in North Korea.

The sacralisation of politics

One of the first to use the term political religion was a German-American professor of political science. In 1938, just before the Anschluss, Eric Voegelin, an academic based at the University of Vienna and a man appalled by the expansion of Nazism, wrote an essay called The Political Religions. Presenting analysis that stretched from the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton to the fascist and communist regimes that had developed since the end of the First World War, Voegelin warned how faith was being manipulated by modern dictatorships, fascist and communist. These new systems were appropriating elements of Christianity’s symbolism to create new types of collective affinity, based either on national identity and race or class. For him, this modern development was rooted in the breakdown of religious faith set in train by the Reformation and then the Enlightenment. Voegelin was a critic of secularisation, and so argued that modern political religions were the logical result of the decadence that the breakdown of traditional notions of faith represented.

Other thinkers of this period were also interested in the political religion concept. In 1939, the French philosopher Raymond Aron warned of ‘notre époque de religions politiques’. During the Second World War he described how communist and fascist totalitarian states tried to develop a type of absolute certainty that was offered by pre-modern Christianity. Yet for Aron they ultimately failed to achieve their aim of unifying society through a new faith as their ideologies were crude, simplistic and a mere caricature of earlier forms of religion. Aron explained in his book L’homme contre le tyrans that the power of Nazism lay in its ability to unite the rationality of modern bureaucratic systems with the power of the irrational through new symbols, mythology and rituals. The era of totalitarian regimes was defined by cynical leaders who manipulated the masses through a modern form of collective fanaticism, Aron concluded.

Interest in the political religion concept from Voegelin, Aron and others from this period, such as Rudolf Rocker, showed that a range of thinkers and writers of the interwar era recognised something quite profound in the ways totalitarian regimes manipulated faith to offer new answers to a world seemingly gone awry. Another was Waldamar Gurain, who by the 1950s went further than Aron and argued that political religions were more than cynical manipulations; rather, they expressed genuinely held beliefs of the leading proponents of these systems. ‘The totalitarian movements which have arisen since World War I are fundamentally religious movements’, Gurain stated in his 1952 essay Totalitarian Religions, adding: ‘The totalitarian political religions are expressions of secularist thought in a world where the inherited traditional stability and continuity are threatened or have disappeared.’ Totalitarian states, in their quest to reshape man and society as a whole, were different from anything that came before. They were based on a new conception of faith that emerged in response to secularised modernity and political crisis.

Building on these earlier thinkers, Emilio Gentile has become the most prominent advocate of the concept in recent times. His key book The Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy, published in English translation in 1996, examined the emotional appeal of Mussolini’s regime. Gentile’s subsequent book, Politics as Religion, then explained in greater conceptual detail his reworking of earlier debates on the relationship between political religions, totalitarianism and secularisation.

Utopian vision

Gentile’s approach argues that political religions are distinct from the broader phenomenon of civil religions, though both are ‘secular religions’. These relatively new developments are also different from the older ‘traditional religions’, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Civil religions remain widespread in secular modernity, and they allow degrees of political sacralisation to sit alongside many other institutions. American patriotism from the late eighteenth century onwards, for example, has been expressed through sacralised phenomena, such as new national symbols, the ritualised worship of the flag and belief in a national mission, yet America has also allowed individual freedoms to flourish and political pluralism to mature. For Gentile, this provides a good working example of a civil religion.

However, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, as well as the Soviet Union, were exemplars of its more hard-line variant, political religion. Such states, at least in principle, rejected pluralism and instead sought a monopoly on belief and the total commitment from those who lived within them. For Gentile, there are several key features that characterise a political religion. They are founded around a sacralised ideal of an essentially secular identity. Some political religions, such as fascist ones, are based on national identity and race; others, like communism, are based on class. Though ideas of race, nation and class are radically different, for Gentile they could all be used to evoke a sense of a collective identity deemed to be superior to the individual, and so people are morally obliged to carry out what was best for the collective, not themselves. Political religions are diametrically opposed to liberal notions of individualism, in other words.

There is also a utopian vision at the core of a political religion, giving them a sense of messianic mission, binding leaders and followers together in a shared project. Finally, to express this, they develop new rituals that make a leading individual the personification of the political religion’s mission, and a wider mythology that allows societies to engage in activities that express their collective belief in the sacred cause espoused by the new faith.

For comparativists like Gentile, the point is not to reduce all such examples to a single concept, but rather to use the term to develop a deeper understanding of the diverse forms political religions can take. For historians of fascism, it helps explain that fascisms are complex, and not simply a set of prejudices imposed on the masses. People living in interwar fascist regimes, or attracted to fascist movements, were not brainwashed. The faith held by leaders and wider society was symbiotic: many were true believers and were engaged in an ‘anthropological revolution’, an ongoing experiment to create a new type of society.

While Gentile has been at the forefront of defining the concept, others have also come round to his perspective. One leading figure in fascism studies whose own work has always been concerned with the ways myth lies at the core of the appeal of fascism, Roger Griffin, was initially sceptical of the idea of political religion. However, he has become a staunch defender of Gentile’s work, and the concept of political religions more generally.

Others reviving the term in more recent times include Phillipe Burrin, whose 1997 article Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept critiqued Voegelin, but argued the term was crucial for understanding Nazism and Italian Fascism. Michael Burleigh was another leading advocate of the term by the late 1990s, and a cofounder of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, now Politics Religion & Ideology. His books Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes have offered a more popular history approach to exploring the concept. More recently, A. James Gregor’s Totalitarians and Political Religion: An Intellectual History explores the concept from Hegel to National Socialism. It has been applied to cultural figures too, as Matthew Feldman has used the term to help explore the poet and fascist propagandist Ezra Pound.

Reformulations of faith in a secular world

Other modern promoters of the concept are more ambiguous in their embrace of the term. Hans Maier, for example, has edited a three-volume set of books looking at the relationship between totalitarianism and political religion. However, in an article from 2007, he also stated that ‘the concept of “political religions” is, for the time being, a necessary if somewhat ill-defined conceptual category’, adding the term helps us remember that ‘religion does not allow itself to be easily banished from society, and that, where this is tried, it returns in unpredictable and perverted forms.’

David Roberts’s 2009 article ‘Political Religion’ and the Totalitarian Departures of Interwar Europe takes a similar position, acknowledging many problems with the concept while also seeing its value in allowing for a complex reinterpretation of totalitarianism and its history. More forcefully, Ian Kershaw has dismissed the term as ‘voguish’, yet at the same time discussed the importance of understanding Nazism’s ‘pseudo-religious’ qualities, such as its redemptive mission.

Kevin Passmore has levied a more fundamental critique. Drawing on a gender history perspective, he stresses that the origins of the term are rooted in a milieu that prioritised the study of men within fascist movements. For Passmore, recent theorists of political religion have often failed to move beyond fascism’s own gender assumptions, and have marginalised the role of women and their motivations for participating in fascist movements and regimes. He concludes that approaches to studying fascism that do more to break down the distinctions between leaders and followers, elite and masses, are needed to capture the complexity of the gendered dynamics of fascist politics. Moreover, he rather pointedly notes the prominence of male theorists leading the debates regarding the value of the term.

While those wishing to find new applications for the political religion concept would do well to heed warnings from its critics, they could also try to develop it using more recent approaches to history, such as the history of emotions. More work using the political religions concept is timely and necessary, and can stimulate fresh thinking on how diverse forms of political religion allowed deeply held faiths to emerge not only within totalitarian states but also within much more marginalised extremist movements. It allows researchers to frame questions about the levels to which people genuinely believed in fascist politics, past and present, or were manipulated by cynical leaders. It can also offer an approach for comparing fascism with communism and newer extreme movements, such as ISIS. The political religion concept allows us to see that, while radically different, these are all extreme reformulations of faith for a secularising world.

Visit the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (#CARR)

In the U.S., the average consumer has more than enough clothes. So labels have to keep generating new styles and fashion trends to keep people consuming. If clothes didn’t go out of fashion, think of how little each of us would spend on them.

Besides the fact that we should all feel a little guilty for being manipulated into consumption by the whims of “fashion,” the ever-growing number of textiles produced worldwide is bad for the environment.

According to the EPA, textile waste occupies nearly 5 percent of all landfill space. Every year, the U.S. generates an average 25 billion pounds of textiles, but only 15 percent is donated or recycled and 85 percent winds up in landfills.

Fashion designer Stella McCartney and Adidas have teamed up to help stop the growing problem of textile waste by creating a 100 percent recyclable hoodie and tennis dress.

The Adidas by Stella McCartney Infinite Hoodie was created with advanced textile innovations company Evrnu and is made from 60 percent NuCycl and 40 percent organic cotton that has been diverted from landfills.

The Adidas by Stella McCartney Biofabric Tennis Dress was made in collaboration with Bolt Threads, a company that specializes in bioengineered sustainable materials and fibers. It’s made with cellulose-blended yarn and Microsilk, a protein-based material comprised of renewable ingredients.

Unfortunately, if you’d like to rock some of this sustainable athletic gear it’s going to be a while. The tennis dress is a prototype and only 50 hoodies have been produced.

“Fashion is one of the most harmful industries to the environment,” James Carnes, Vice President of Strategy Creation at Adidas, said in a statement. “With Adidas by Stella McCartney, we’re creating high-performance products that also safeguard the future of the planet.”

This isn’t McCartney’s first foray into eco-friendly fashion. Her label aims to ensure that all of her garments are recycled or reused. According to McCartney’s website, her fashion brand sees the need for sustainable clothing to be “an exciting opportunity to unleash the creative potential of fashion and it is an opportunity we are proud to be part of.”

According to Adidas, this is just the first step in its ultimate goal of becoming 100 percent sustainable. 

“Creating products with upcycled plastic waste was our first step,” the company said in a press release. “The next challenge is to end the concept of waste entirely. Focusing on three core areas, we will explore ways to create products that can either be fully recyclable or biodegradable.”

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Olive trees have been considered a symbol of immortality dating back to ancient times, but one olive tree might actually be immortal. 

The Olive Tree of Vouves, located in Ano Vouves on the island of Crete in Greece, is over 3,000 years old and shows no signs of heading into retirement anytime soon. The ancient plant still produces olives. And yes, you can get olive oil made from the fruit of this tree. 

It’s hard to say exactly when the tree’s birthday is. The heartwood of the tree has rotted away, but a tree-ring analysis of the remaining layers found that it’s at least 2,000 years old. Scientists from the University of Crete think the tree might be closer to 4,000 years old, but the official sign in front of the tree says the plant is 3,000. What’s a thousand years when you’re that old? 

Two cemeteries from the Geometric Art period (back when geometric motifs in vases were all the rage) were found not too far from the tree, and might give us some clues as to how old the tree is. The Geometric Art period lasted from 1100 to 800 B.C., which means the tree was likely planted between those years. It is theorized that the tree was a “centerpiece” for the cemeteries. 

Not only is the tree old, it is big. The trunk of the tree is more than 40 feet around, and has a diameter of 15 feet. The trunk of the tree is twisted around itself, with tufts of green leaves shooting towards the sky. Branches of the tree were used to create wreaths for the winners of the 2004 and 2008 Olympics. 

It’s not unusual that this tree has been basically immortal. Olive trees are very resilient. Not only are they drought, disease, and fire resistant, they also constantly renew their wood. It is for these reasons that so many olive trees were planted in the region. 

The Olive Tree of Vouves isn’t the only ancient olive tree still standing. There are six other Mediterranean olive trees that are believed to have been planted before our calendar flipped from B.C. to A.D. However, it is believed the Olive Tree of Vouves is the oldest of the seven. 

If you want to see the tree for yourself, you’re more than welcome. The tree became a protected natural monument in 1997, and a museum containing traditional tools of olive cultivation was set up in 2009. Over 20,000 people visit the tree each and every year. 

We doubt eating the olives from the tree will grant you everlasting life, so if you’re looking for actual immortality, you might want to search elsewhere. 

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In August 2017, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) co-leader Alexander Gauland proposed to ‘dispatch’ the then Federal Commissioner for Immigration, Refugees and Integration, Aydan Özoğuz (SPD), back to Anatolia. Some weeks later, the AfD party entered the German Bundestag following the September 2017 general elections.

Özoğuz, for her part, silently disappeared from the scene when Merkel’s grand coalition government was renewed. It is striking that the ruling parties did not prevent Özoğuz’ disappearance from front-stage politics after she had become a target of what is perceived to be Germany’s new far-right giant, the AfD.

Importantly, the German Volksparteien revitalized the ‘Turkish issue’, this time unfolding in the domestic-foreign policy nexus between Germany and Turkey. Reignited transnational connections between Erdoğan and his Germany-based supporters made the Volksparteien adopt a consistent harsh commentary, a position long adopted by the AfD. Why did these governing mainstream parties make such concessions to the populist radical right AfD party? What sequence of events secured such a tacit acceptance of what had been solely an AfD stance?

Germany’s ‘Turkish issue’ returns

From late 2015 onwards, Merkel was eager to rapidly defuse the growing domestic dissent against her government’s decision to welcome refugees to Germany. She fixed the EU-Turkey refugee deal with Turkey in order to secure European borders. In May 2016, the Christian Social Union (CSU) leader, Horst Seehofer, questioned this deal, blamed Merkel for being susceptible to blackmailing by Turkish President Erdoğan, which triggered another national cultural identity scandal (besides his plea for an upper limit for refugee inflow). Mainstream parties were indeed deeply divided in regard to the ‘Turkish issue’. In contrast, the AfD was the only party to retain a consistent stance, opposing Turkey’s ‘despot’ Erdoğan and proposing return migration to his Germany-based supporters.

Amidst stormy Germany-Turkey relations, the current health minister, Jens Spahn (CDU), fuelled the ‘Turkish issue’ further: he questioned Turkish Germans’ loyalty and dual citizenship because of their support for Erdoğan. Research shows that this perception of Turkish-Germans’ alleged devotion for Erdoğan is distorted though. In contrast to Spahn, Özoğuz framed general scepticism over dual belonging as outdated.[1] This event not only exposed Grand Coalition government dissent over the ‘Turkish issue’, but also revealed an SPD zigzagging in identity politics to a remarkable extent. Özoğuz articulated liberal stances, while former SPD leader Sigmar Gabriel proposed that Social Democrats had lost touch with social democratic voters who, till now, have withheld their assent from ‘postmodern anything goes slogans’.

The CDU zigzagged as well. Late in 2016, CDU party members voted in favour of revoking Germany’s dual citizenship regulations at a federal party congress, which Merkel staunchly rejected immediately after. The Union parties were deeply divided between the liberal Merkel stance on one hand, and on the other hardliners, including the aforementioned Seehofer, calling for a harsher reaction to Erdoğan and the revocation of dual citizenship rights of Turkish Germans based on a supposed ‘conflict of loyalties’.

The Germany-Turkey blame game hardened stances: the disgruntled Erdoğan urged Turkish Germans to boycott the established parties (notably the Union parties, the SPD and the Green party). Paradoxically, this meant greater leverage for the AfD in the election results. In a follow-up TV debate, the Volksparteien drifted a long way to the right: both party leaders, Merkel and Schulz, engaging in competitive zeal to demonstrate who could show a stricter stance against Erdoğan once (re-)elected. A stance once initially and exclusively espoused by the AfD now occupied the centre of the political stage.

Gauland (AfD) vs Özoğuz (SPD)

In a May 2017 op-ed, Aydan Özoğuz claimed that “a specific German culture, beyond the German language, is not identifiable”. On 26 August, Alexander Gauland responded:

“…invite her to Eichsfeld and then show her what specific German culture is. After that, she will never come here again, and we will then be able to, thank god, dispatch her to Anatolia.” Gauland’s timing was telling, he was reviving the ‘Turkish issue’ some three weeks before voters cast their ballots in September, while Özoğuz’ op-ed appeared in May 2017.

Gauland’s infamous attack was immediately condemned across the political spectrum. Proposals for ‘removing’ an immigrant political actor to her supposed ‘homeland’ moves far beyond what is ethically and morally acceptable in German mainstream political discourse. However, Özoğuz disappeared when Merkel’s fourth cabinet assembled in early 2018, and has not been given any highly visible role since.

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Creeping land grabs

The recent controversy over the ‘Turkish issue’ has resulted in mainstream parties taking a hard line on issues of immigration and national identity, on which in the end they did not deliver. This painted a picture of a divided and incapacitated Berlin Republic, facilitating a climate fertile for the AfD’s winning formula: oppose the ‘corrupt elites’, for ‘the German people’s’ nation. The cathartic story of ‘Umvolkung’ (ethnicity inversion) has been most powerfully depicted by Gauland: “Someone wants to take this Germany away from us. And, dear Friends, this is something like – one would call this an invasion in the past – a creeping land grab”. The promise of an ‘ethno-national rebirth’ for native white Germans resonates well in such a climate.

Further, short-sighted cosying up to the far right has distinctly backfired: the presence of the AfD party has caused mainstream parties to end up drifting even more towards the right than they would have initially conceived. In the worst-case scenario, the conservative (white) native voters they seek to address deeply distrust those mainstream ‘opportunists’, and those who trusted in them before are disappointed by the mainstreams’ drift to the right.

The case of Özoğuz and the ‘Turkish issue’ can be understood as a concession to the far right. To prevent such developments, mainstream parties need to shape political discourse, instead of being shaped by it. With their attempts to attract both sides of the cleavage, German parties only exacerbated voters’ disenchantment with politics and facilitated the present growth of AfD – ultimately driving mainstream centre parties to cosy up to far-right stances.

With the return of the ‘Turkish issue’ Angela Merkel, globally praised for defending western liberal values, was thrown into a quandary. In fact, she defended and appeased key immigrant political stakeholders (such as journalist Ferda Ataman) when she found herself torn between the ‘Alexanders’, ‘Horsts’ and ‘Aydans’. However, Merkel failed when it came to responding to the mainstreaming of divisive rhetoric – though she is clearly not the only one to blame for that. One might ask who, other than her, has the power to push through unifying compromises given her political reputation over the past decade.

Visit the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right (#CARR)

There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of… environmentalism?

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that we are living in a time when radical, rapid and far-reaching changes are needed to avert environmental disaster. Scientific evidence supports Extinction Rebellion’s statement that “Humanity finds itself embroiled in an event unprecedented in its history. One which, unless immediately addressed, will catapult us further into the destruction of all we hold dear…”

Given such an extreme future, what constitutes extremism, and who gets to decide this? On the 16th of July the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange put out a report claiming that Extinction Rebellion are an extremist organisation. The report attempted to link Extinction Rebellion to terrorism. Among the more worrying recommendations were calls for a more forceful approach to prosecuting non-violent protestors, even changing the law to give police radical powers to shut down peaceful protest. Where do these views come from, do they have a basis in fact, and what purpose do they serve?

To answer this, we consider three accusations of extremism made by the Policy Exchange authors against Extinction Rebellion: (1) it is anti-democratic; (2) it is anticapitalist and anti-growth; (3) its potential for violence deserves extreme repression. In each case we argue that the weight of evidence supports the idea that Extinction Rebellion’s program is coherent and necessary.

The case for reforming democracy

To manage ecological crises, there is a need to remedy anti-democratic deficiencies within our political systems. The scientific basis of climate change and ecological breakdown has been established for decades. Yet we hurtle onward towards disaster. Fossil fuel use and biodiversity loss are not only still rising: they are accelerating. Our existing governments and market institutions have not responded to the challenges of climate breakdown and ecological crises. They must be changed.

A key source of anti-democratic deficiency is the corrupting influence of the climate denial industry. The most brazen examples are outright climate denial campaigns. Funded by large companies (led by the fossil fuel industry, but including others like Google and Amazon) through complex networks of think tanks and lobby groups, these campaigns span multiple decades and directly attempt to undermine the scientific basis of climate change. Having mostly lost on this front, they have now moved on to simply delaying action using all means possible. But there are also more pernicious mechanisms at work, such as when fossil fuel dependent sectors of the economy threaten to withdraw or relocate in response to limits on emissions.

Our current, democratic systems have not been up to the task of countering this corruption. This is hardly surprising: representative democracies were often specifically designed to tilt the scales in favour of existing economic power, rather than the needs of the majority of the population.

Extinction Rebellion’s proposed reforms of existing democratic institutions are in line with the latest academic findings and practical action in this area. Among others, political theorist Dr Marit Hammond has convincingly argued that our current democratic structures are insufficient and that more direct democracy is needed to combat the ecological crisis. Specifically, Extinction Rebellion are calling for Citizen Assemblies to deliberate on the best way forward on environmental crises. Citizen Assemblies are not far-fetched or extreme structures, they exist in many countries, including most prominently Ireland, whose Citizen Assemblies’ work on abortion rights and climate has won international praise.

The case for reforming the economy

Researchers (including ourselves!) have long studied the connection between economic growth and the environment. The ‘degrowth’ or ‘post-growth’ position is that a growing economy makes reducing environmental impacts harder at best, and impossible at worst. The core argument is that all economic activity is based on the use of energy to transform materials. This is illustrated in Kate Raworths ‘embedded economy’ diagram. The economy takes in energy and materials from the environment and emits wastes and pollution to the environment.

When we investigate the material and energy basis of the economy, the empirical evidence shows that we must either reduce the size of the economy, or become much more efficient – using less energy and materials to make ever more stuff. We have no evidence that we are able to become efficient enough to reduce overall environmental impact whilst still growing the economy. Tim Jackson explains that to decarbonise while growing the economy, we would need to do so at a rate 50 times faster than we managed in the last decade. In short, ‘green growth’ requires the invention of miracle technology. Given the immediate and urgent risks we face, waiting for a miracle seems to us to be the more extreme position.

These are the reasons that the post-growth view is far from fringe. Kate Raworth’s growth-agnostic book ‘Doughnut Economics’, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Tim Jackson’s TED talk “Prosperity Without Growth” has nearly 1 million views. In the UK, there is a parliamentary group on the limits to growth made up of members from all major political parties.These are not the views of fringe extremists.

Some post-growthers (ourselves included!) also criticise capitalism, since the profit motive and competition at the heart of capitalism inexorably lead to expansion, social exploitation and environmental degradation. This position, just like the more general post-growth one, is far from extreme. To give a couple of examples: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company recently tweeted “Capitalism may be great for selling ice cream, but it's not great for saving the earth.” Even in the USA, recent survey data found that more Democrats prefer socialism to capitalism, with most young Democrats having a negative view of capitalism.

In short, there is a large body of evidence supporting the idea that growth makes meeting environmental targets much harder than it need be. Many academics working in this area argue that profound economic reform is not extreme: it is necessary.

Do Extinction Rebellion’s tactics deserve extreme repression?

We have set out our reasons for believing Extinction Rebellion’s demands and program for reform to be reasonable: ecological breakdown is an unprecedented threat to civilisation. Critiques of growth, capitalism and our current, limited, forms of democracy are necessary to combat this threat. We have not yet tackled the most worrying and unfounded demands of the Policy Exchange report: the smear that Extinction Rebellion are terrorists, and that the state must step in and crackdown on their peaceful protests.

This accusation is baseless. It rests on the pure speculation that “some on the fringes of the movement might at some point break with organisational discipline and engage in violence”. It is unfair to smear an entire social movement, and hundreds of thousands of dedicated sympathizers, on the basis of something that has not happened. It is troubling that Policy Exchange would use such baseless smears to advocate state repression of peaceful protest.

The Policy Exchange authors are claiming that any challenge to our current institutions of parliamentary democracy and capitalist profit-driven economies is extreme and deserves repression. The implication is that anyone who criticizes the structure of our polity and economy should be considered an extremist. Under such a view, almost all social movements are ‘extreme’. Both the suffragette and the civil rights movements critiqued democratic and economic institutions. Emmeline Pankhurst openly declared “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.” Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” Were they unreasonable extremists? Or rather are the conservative authors of the Policy Exchange report trying to place extreme limits on democratic dissent?

Conclusion: who is served by which side of this debate?

The real concerns of the Policy Exchange report authors are demonstrated through their call for the state to step in and protect ‘our free-market economy’. The defining characteristic of neoliberalism is the use of the state to create and protect markets. Since Adam Smith, economists have known that markets represent the interests of the rich. Moreover, Policy Exchange’s lack of transparency regarding its funders, the notable absence of support for any form of robust or effective action on climate breakdown and its approving quote of an unelected climate denying coal baron, provide us with some hints as to which specific market interests and industries they may be protecting.

In contrast, in organising to protect the biosphere, Extinction Rebellion are working to protect all of us. We cannot live on a dead planet. We must do all we can to protect the basic environmental conditions that allow humanity to flourish. In this context, Extinction Rebellion’s economic and political program is on the side of reason, and well supported by academic research.

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There is a spectre haunting Europe, the spectre of… environmentalism?

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that we are living in a time when radical, rapid and far-reaching changes are needed to avert environmental disaster. Scientific evidence supports Extinction Rebellion’s statement that “Humanity finds itself embroiled in an event unprecedented in its history. One which, unless immediately addressed, will catapult us further into the destruction of all we hold dear…”

Given such an extreme future, what constitutes extremism, and who gets to decide this? On the 16th of July the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange put out a report claiming that Extinction Rebellion are an extremist organisation. The report attempted to link Extinction Rebellion to terrorism. Among the more worrying recommendations were calls for a more forceful approach to prosecuting non-violent protestors, even changing the law to give police radical powers to shut down peaceful protest. Where do these views come from, do they have a basis in fact, and what purpose do they serve?

To answer this, we consider three accusations of extremism made by the Policy Exchange authors against Extinction Rebellion: (1) it is anti-democratic; (2) it is anticapitalist and anti-growth; (3) its potential for violence deserves extreme repression. In each case we argue that the weight of evidence supports the idea that Extinction Rebellion’s program is coherent and necessary.

The case for reforming democracy

To manage ecological crises, there is a need to remedy anti-democratic deficiencies within our political systems. The scientific basis of climate change and ecological breakdown has been established for decades. Yet we hurtle onward towards disaster. Fossil fuel use and biodiversity loss are not only still rising: they are accelerating. Our existing governments and market institutions have not responded to the challenges of climate breakdown and ecological crises. They must be changed.

A key source of anti-democratic deficiency is the corrupting influence of the climate denial industry. The most brazen examples are outright climate denial campaigns. Funded by large companies (led by the fossil fuel industry, but including others like Google and Amazon) through complex networks of think tanks and lobby groups, these campaigns span multiple decades and directly attempt to undermine the scientific basis of climate change. Having mostly lost on this front, they have now moved on to simply delaying action using all means possible. But there are also more pernicious mechanisms at work, such as when fossil fuel dependent sectors of the economy threaten to withdraw or relocate in response to limits on emissions.

Our current, democratic systems have not been up to the task of countering this corruption. This is hardly surprising: representative democracies were often specifically designed to tilt the scales in favour of existing economic power, rather than the needs of the majority of the population.

Extinction Rebellion’s proposed reforms of existing democratic institutions are in line with the latest academic findings and practical action in this area. Among others, political theorist Dr Marit Hammond has convincingly argued that our current democratic structures are insufficient and that more direct democracy is needed to combat the ecological crisis. Specifically, Extinction Rebellion are calling for Citizen Assemblies to deliberate on the best way forward on environmental crises. Citizen Assemblies are not far-fetched or extreme structures, they exist in many countries, including most prominently Ireland, whose Citizen Assemblies’ work on abortion rights and climate has won international praise.

The case for reforming the economy

Researchers (including ourselves!) have long studied the connection between economic growth and the environment. The ‘degrowth’ or ‘post-growth’ position is that a growing economy makes reducing environmental impacts harder at best, and impossible at worst. The core argument is that all economic activity is based on the use of energy to transform materials. This is illustrated in Kate Raworths ‘embedded economy’ diagram. The economy takes in energy and materials from the environment and emits wastes and pollution to the environment.

When we investigate the material and energy basis of the economy, the empirical evidence shows that we must either reduce the size of the economy, or become much more efficient – using less energy and materials to make ever more stuff. We have no evidence that we are able to become efficient enough to reduce overall environmental impact whilst still growing the economy. Tim Jackson explains that to decarbonise while growing the economy, we would need to do so at a rate 50 times faster than we managed in the last decade. In short, ‘green growth’ requires the invention of miracle technology. Given the immediate and urgent risks we face, waiting for a miracle seems to us to be the more extreme position.

These are the reasons that the post-growth view is far from fringe. Kate Raworth’s growth-agnostic book ‘Doughnut Economics’, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Tim Jackson’s TED talk “Prosperity Without Growth” has nearly 1 million views. In the UK, there is a parliamentary group on the limits to growth made up of members from all major political parties.These are not the views of fringe extremists.

Some post-growthers (ourselves included!) also criticise capitalism, since the profit motive and competition at the heart of capitalism inexorably lead to expansion, social exploitation and environmental degradation. This position, just like the more general post-growth one, is far from extreme. To give a couple of examples: Ben & Jerry’s ice cream company recently tweeted “Capitalism may be great for selling ice cream, but it's not great for saving the earth.” Even in the USA, recent survey data found that more Democrats prefer socialism to capitalism, with most young Democrats having a negative view of capitalism.

In short, there is a large body of evidence supporting the idea that growth makes meeting environmental targets much harder than it need be. Many academics working in this area argue that profound economic reform is not extreme: it is necessary.

Do Extinction Rebellion’s tactics deserve extreme repression?

We have set out our reasons for believing Extinction Rebellion’s demands and program for reform to be reasonable: ecological breakdown is an unprecedented threat to civilisation. Critiques of growth, capitalism and our current, limited, forms of democracy are necessary to combat this threat. We have not yet tackled the most worrying and unfounded demands of the Policy Exchange report: the smear that Extinction Rebellion are terrorists, and that the state must step in and crackdown on their peaceful protests.

This accusation is baseless. It rests on the pure speculation that “some on the fringes of the movement might at some point break with organisational discipline and engage in violence”. It is unfair to smear an entire social movement, and hundreds of thousands of dedicated sympathizers, on the basis of something that has not happened. It is troubling that Policy Exchange would use such baseless smears to advocate state repression of peaceful protest.

The Policy Exchange authors are claiming that any challenge to our current institutions of parliamentary democracy and capitalist profit-driven economies is extreme and deserves repression. The implication is that anyone who criticizes the structure of our polity and economy should be considered an extremist. Under such a view, almost all social movements are ‘extreme’. Both the suffragette and the civil rights movements critiqued democratic and economic institutions. Emmeline Pankhurst openly declared “We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.” Similarly, Martin Luther King Jr. stated, “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” Were they unreasonable extremists? Or rather are the conservative authors of the Policy Exchange report trying to place extreme limits on democratic dissent?

Conclusion: who is served by which side of this debate?

The real concerns of the Policy Exchange report authors are demonstrated through their call for the state to step in and protect ‘our free-market economy’. The defining characteristic of neoliberalism is the use of the state to create and protect markets. Since Adam Smith, economists have known that markets represent the interests of the rich. Moreover, Policy Exchange’s lack of transparency regarding its funders, the notable absence of support for any form of robust or effective action on climate breakdown and its approving quote of an unelected climate denying coal baron, provide us with some hints as to which specific market interests and industries they may be protecting.

In contrast, in organising to protect the biosphere, Extinction Rebellion are working to protect all of us. We cannot live on a dead planet. We must do all we can to protect the basic environmental conditions that allow humanity to flourish. In this context, Extinction Rebellion’s economic and political program is on the side of reason, and well supported by academic research.