We need a new environmental movement with new goals and new organisations. We need more people working in the field...in the actual environment...and fewer people behind computer screens. We need more scientists and many fewer lawyers.

Nothing is more inherently political than our shared physical environment and nothing is more ill-served by allegiance to a single political party. Precisely because the environment is shared it cannot be managed by one faction according to its own economics or aesthetic preferences. Sooner or later the opposing faction will take power and previous policies will be reversed.

Stable management of the environment requires recognition that all preferences have their place...snowmobiles and fishermen, dirt bikes and preservationists. These preferences are at odds and their incompatibility cannot be avoided. But resolving incompatible goals is the true function of politics. This is what politicians are for. And then there is the problem of science.

We desperately need a non-partisan, blinded funding mechanism to conduct research to determine appropriate policy. Scientists are only too aware whom they are working for. Those who fund research...whether a drug company, a government agency or an environmental organisation...always have a particular outcome in mind. Research funding is almost never open-ended or open-minded.

Scientists know that continued funding depends on delivering the results the funders desire and as a result of this environmental organisation studies are every bit as biased and suspect as industry studies. Government studies are similarly biased according to who is running the department or administration at the time. No faction should be given a free pass.

A local...not a global...approach is needed to global problems. I have a problem with people in some far-away Western city at a desk in some glass skyscraper deciding what is in my best interest. They don't live where I do. They don't know the local conditions or the local problems I face. They feel they know the solutions to all my problems and how I should live my life. But they don't.

And this concern is just the tip of the iceberg. Ivan Illich has drilled into this iceberg from different directions and has deeper misgivings about the disabling professions and their impact on conviviality and the structural monopolies they have imposed upon the overdeveloped world. It is one thing to seed clouds over Vietnam in a vain attempt to meddle with climate to win an unwinnable local war. But it is hubris for global organisations...whether made up of governments, corporations or selfish money interests...to believe they can manage the world's climate. Nemisis will be the inevitable consequence as sure as night follows day.

Science is just one of many commons that local people must reclaim from the money power, from the financial and industrial mechanisms and from the embrace of the would-be architects of a totalitarian one world state.

There is an integrity in diversity and a sanity in locality that is altogether absent in large systems and global missolutions. When something is wrong something is too big. And where science is concerned only the local is real...and this applies as much to scientific data...this place, this laboratory, this scientist...as it does to everything else.

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