Do you want to know why there is a protest outside St Paul's?

It's simple! When the failed banks need money, they get it, lots and lots and lots of it, more than enough so they can even pay out huge bonus payments and it's our money.

The Euro presently has huge problems, so it gets propped up by austerity measure and with lots and lots our money.

If finance is needed to cover the cost of wars in, just by coincidence, oil producing states, money is available, lots and lots of it, and it's our money.

When there is a massive oil spill disaster it get paid for in the end by our money, lots and lots of it.

So here in the UK we are obviously not a country that is broke, enough money is available for all the above, so what is it that there is not enough money available for?

When finance is needed to cover the cost of green energy this has to be funded by additional taxes, despite the fact that here in the UK we spend billions of pounds year after never ending year looking after spent nuclear fuel.

And when finance is needed for schools, hospitals, adult social care, children's hospices, for community projects for more nurses and teachers and police, for the fire and ambulance services or for those that have lost homes or jobs or those now living on the streets it's either in very short supply indeed or completely unavailable.

That's why there is a protest outside St. Paul's and in Wall Street and all the other places... that's why, because it's not the banks or big business that should be bailed out, it is those that really need the cash, like those in the last paragraph.

What we all need to protest about is the same as Jesus did, and that is greed and economic inequality.

As Jesus said “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” (Luke 12:15)

"If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person?" (John 1:17-18) A good question indeed...

So, where does YOUR money go?

It was when I was at theological college that I first met my fellow student and now friend and fellow minister Angela Steele. One of our tasks was to preach at a combined staff and student’s service. Her first line when she did is still with me. “Do you know where your pension funds are invested and how that money is used? Is it invested in ethical companies or those that abuse others in some way for your future income?” The point she made was that where we spend and invest our money is actually a large part of our faith.

It was a lesson that I have tried to live up to, so... do YOU know what the organisations YOU spend or invest your money with do with it, are they involved in exploitation and are they as environmentally sound as they claim?

Is it invested in companies such as Caterpillar Inc? They are a multinational company involved in earth moving equipment, they also make the large armoured bulldozers that the Israelis use to bulldoze homes in the Palestinian areas, and they made the one that killed US peace activist Rachel Corrie. OK, so perhaps you do not have any investments in Caterpillar Inc, but Sainsbury’s, Tesco, and Waitrose all openly sell settlement produce from land the Palestinians’ were forcibly removed from, the very thing that Rachel was trying to stop.

How about buying that chocolate bar with the ‘Fairtrade’ mark? Think first, because ‘Greenwash’ abounds! For example That Kit-Kat bar with the Fairtrade logo is a Nestle production; a company that is supplied by companies involved in Rain Forest destruction, operates in several tax havens and with several oppressive regimes and is involved in political lobbying and mis-promotes baby milk.

The Canadian Tar Sands project is an environmental disaster in the making, This huge project has investors from many countries, including a large stake, invested by a company called Husky Energy. They posses around 511,000 acres of tar sands leases and have a 50/50 partnership agreement with BP for a 50/50 to develop the tar sands project.

Husky Energy is owned by Hong Kong based Hutchison Whampoa, a multi-national company with operations in 55 countries across the globe and a turnover of around £31,034.9 million per year. In the UK Hutchison Whampoa own Superdrug!

VW... Now they make environmentally sound car... or do they? The latest UK TV ads show a range of cars (at times informing the viewer that at the bottom of the screen that some of these are only available in left-hand drive, we use right-hand drive in the UK!) including concept cars with images of wind farms in the background and saying that an electric car is planned for production in the near future. What VW don’t tell you is that it's lobbying against climate change laws, funding lobbying groups to the tune of millions of Euros to stop Europe reducing its Greenhouse Gas emissions from 20% to 30% by 2020.

Do you spread Flora on your bread? If so then remember that the company that produces it, Unilever, test products on animals, lobbies politically, promotes Geneticall Modified food, uses factory farmed eggs and meat and operates in several tax havens and with several oppressive regimes.

The safest way to make sure that others do not profit from your spendong power is to buy locally produced items whenever possible and check where your pension funds are being invested. Someone some where profited from the death of my fellow Christian Rachel Corrie.

"Why are you an Environmentalist?" is a question I am often asked

It really is simple; God made creation for all to share and I am working for those yet to be born to ensure that the generations to come will learn to love, enjoy and share the work of God's hands just as I do.

It is our responsibility as His hands, feet, eyes and ears to ensure that our generation is looked back upon as the one that, when aware of the environmental problem, acted.

We live in a generation where things are loved and people used, it should be the other way round, we should love those in our families yet to be born and leave them an environmental legacy to be proud of.



"Ecclesiastes 3:11 Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end."

I will go with that!

(CARBON) FOOTPRINTS

Last night I dreamed a dream.

I was walking along the beach with My Lord. Across the dark sky flashed all the scenes from my life, for each scene, I noticed two sets of footprints in the sand; I asked The Lord “Why do I see two sets of footprints?”

The Lord said to me “Those are your very own personal carbon footprints, and despite your efforts they are still over twice the global average

Our journey continued on and when the last scene of my life flashed before me I looked back at the many footprints in the sand, but noticed that at times there were only one set. I realized that this occurred at the very lowest and saddest times of my life. This bothered me greatly and I questioned The Lord about my dilemma.

"Lord” I said, “You told me, when I decided to follow you, that you would be with me and talk with me all the way, but I'm aware that during the most troublesome and problematical times of my life I must surely have been alone. I just don't understand it, why it was that when I needed you most you left me?" But why are there only one set of footprints?

He whispered, "My son, my precious child, I love you and will never leave you, never, ever, during your trials and testing’s. When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I arranged for your central heating oil delivery order to be mislaid, your electricity to fail, your car to break down, your flight cancelled or your passport lost."

I was shocked at this and tried to remonstrate with The Lord.

The Lord looked with sadness at the sea gently lapping on the sands and said to me “Well I had to try and do something, this sandy beach was supposed to be a fertile valley”.

Murdoch – News International / News Corporation – World-Wide Lies, Deceit and The Bottom Line.

I have witnessed the Murdoch Media at far to close quarters, the way it expertly wraps lies in half truths and damages lives, so when the facts about the way it works finally emerged I cheered, and when Murdoch said to an MP committee that ‘this is the humblest day of my life’ my heartfelt hope was that it would not be. The video here shows just one aspect of the Murdoch Empire’s influence... but it certainly does not stop there... please, please read on!

Recent revelations have at last uncovered the extent of the Murdoch media's corruption in the UK. His staff hacked the phones of thousands, including grieving widows and murdered schoolgirls. They stole a Prime Minister's bank information, paid huge sums to police officers, and staged a cover up, which included James Murdoch authorizing hush money to victims.

But Murdoch is a global problem, famous for dictating editorial positions to his papers. He has corrupted and controlled democracies by pushing politicians to back his ideas on war, torture and a host of other planetary ills, and destroying careers with smear campaigns unless they do his bidding, or to be more accurate, blackmail.

In the US, he helped elect George W. Bush and now appears to have many Republican presidential candidates on his payroll. His Fox News Network lied to promote the war in Iraq, pushed resentment of Muslims and immigrants and promoted the right-wing tea party. Not only this, he has worked non-stop to block urgent global action on climate change.

Now Murdoch’s political friends, who used to listen avidly and seemingly obey his every word, have dumped him. In the UK his ex CEO Rebekah Brooks faces criminal charges and two of London's most senior police officers, Sir Paul Stephenson and Assistant Commissioner John Yates have resigned and now it is reported that there are US and Australian investigations into the Murdoch News Corp empires.

Since becoming the UK’s Prime Minister sixteen months ago, David Cameron had 26 meetings with Murdoch’s executives. PM Cameron, against the advice of his deputy prime minister, also employed former News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his communications director. Coulson, who has been at the centre of the hacking probe, was arrested on July 8.

Rebekah Brooks, who resigned as CEO over the escalating scandal, is the only person Mr Cameron has invited twice to Chequers, a privilege not extended even to the most senior members of his Cabinet.

Fox News is owned by The Murdoch Empire; see the below and read on!



The Mail on Sunday recently suggested that previous UK PM Tony Blair will face scathing criticism of his role in the launch of the Iraq war when the report of the inquiry under Sir John Chilcot is published in the autumn. The Observer newspaper reported that the terms of an oil deal struck between BP and the Baghdad government would provide the company and its Chinese partner with a 'stranglehold' over the Iraqi economy. Secret documents referred to by the Observer reveal that BP and the Chinese National Petroleum Company have been guaranteed full payment at an agreed price for the oil they extract from Iraq's richest oil field at Rumaila. The oil field - about 20 miles from the Kuwait border - is about half as big as the entire North Sea and accounts for more than 40% of Iraqi oil production. Oil, in turn, provides 95% of the country's export earnings. If extraction from the field is curtailed - because of quotas imposed by the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, for example - the Iraqi government will pay the partnership for the 'lost' production. Similarly, if natural disaster, terrorist attack, or any of a series of other possible developments, disrupts production for more than 90 days, the administration will compensate the partnership for the 'loss'.

The Observer speculated that news of the arrangement will likely 'increase the prejudice of those who saw the UK's involvement in toppling Saddam as part of a "war for oil"' - a consideration which Tony Blair has always insisted played no part in his decision to support the drive towards invasion.

This raises the question of what Mr Blair and Mr Murdoch were talking about in the conversations we now know they held in the days leading up to the invasion on March 20, 2003, because Murdoch was, from the outset, blunt about his reasons for supporting the war. The reason was not to find weapons of mass destruction, or to overthrow a tyrant, but to secure economic interests through control of the flow and price of oil.

Just weeks before the invasion, Murdoch said that "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax-cut in any country."

Mr Blair and Mr Murdoch had three conversations in the nine days before March 20. They spoke on March 11, immediately after Jacques Chirac had announced that France would veto any second UN resolution sanctioning invasion.

The next day, Murdoch’s Sun Newspaper proclaimed: 'Like a cheap tart who puts price before principle, money before honour, Jacques Chirac struts the streets of shame. The French President's vow to veto the second resolution ... puts him right in the gutter."

On March 13, as conflict over a second resolution intensified, the two men talked again. On March 14, The Sun returned to the theme: 'Charlatan Jacques Chirac is basking in cheap applause for his "Save Saddam" campaign - but his treachery will cost his people dear ... This grandstanding egomaniac has inflicted irreparable damage."

On the evening of March 19, as tanks prepared to cross the border, PM Blair and Murdoch talked again; as they did every single one of Mr Murdoch's 127 newspapers around the world, with a combined circulation more than 40 million, urged its readers to back the war, a war that has resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands so far and will result in the death of many, many more in the future. This is because more than 1,820 tons of radioactive nuclear waste (i.e. depleted uranium) has exploded in Iraq so far in the form of armour piercing rounds and bunker busters. 64 kg of uranium were used in the Hiroshima bomb so the U.S. Iraq Nuclear Holocaust represents far more than fourteen thousand Hiroshima's.

The nuclear waste the U.S. has exploded in the Middle East will continue killing for hundreds of years because that's how long these particles of radioactive dust will continue to blow around to be lodged in an individual’s lungs or be ingested.

No WMD's (Weapons of Mass Destruction) were found in Iraq, they were however imported to that country. Reported birth defects among Iraqi newborns are up 600% from before the war, the defects are typical of the kind produced by exposure to radioactive poisons.

The civilian population of Iraq were ‘liberated’, liberated for Murdoch’s desire for cheap oil, aided and abetted by the Western World’s addiction to oil, and at last, the truth is about to emerge!

Sources; the newspapers and media quoted and www.abovetopsecret.com

UK Farms In Crisis; Is it the same where you are?

We have been lucky to live in a farming area for some 34 years now; it once was a farming community but then the supermarkets with their values of the bottom line and sourcing from the cheapest producers from any part of the world closed down many local small farmers and growers. Growers’ in the UK could not compete with, for example tomatoes grown in Africa where the cost of labour and production is low even though the cost of shipping, and the carbon footprint, is high. Our two village market gardens closed down as the majority of our counties grocers shops, unable to compete with the supermarkets closed. One of the market garden owners committed suicide.

The same supermarket pressure has been applied over the last few years to our milk producers, and many are going out of business on a weekly basis. When Pam and I were at the recent South of England Show I took this picture of a milk producer's stall. The most important words read;

Supermarket price approx 85p per litre
Cost of production approx 29p per litre
Farmer paid approx 25p per litre
Outcome 3-4p loss on every litre of milk produced. Thousands of British farms going out of business every year.

The supermarkets focus on buying at the cheapest price and then selling at the highest possible margin. Forget their claims of ‘giving you more’ or even ‘every little helps’ just look at their end of financial year profits to see where their focus really is.

What has happened to the UK farming industry is the equivalent of “selling the family silver”, when the time comes, and it will come soon, that we need the UK’s farmers they will no longer be there... then what?

How the European Food Safety Authority got GM 100% wrong!

In 2007 the EFSA said that ““A large number of experimental studies with livestock have shown that recombinant DNA fragments or proteins derived from GM plants have not been detected in tissues, fluids or edible products of farm animals such as broilers, cattle, pigs or quails.” This was subsequently adopted as the official advice of the UK’s Food Standards Agency in “Transfer of GM material from feed”

GUESS WHAT?

New research from Canada has found a Bt toxin produced by GM insect resistant crops in the blood of women and clear evidence that it was passed to foetuses. The new study was carried out by a team at Sherbrooke University Hospital in Quebec and has been accepted for publication in the peer reviewed journal Reproductive Toxicology. The team took blood samples from 30 pregnant women prior to delivery, 30 samples from umbilical cords immediately after birth and samples from 39 non-pregnant women who were undergoing treatment. All the women were of a similar age and body mass index, and none worked with pesticides or lived with anyone who did. Pesticides used on GM herbicide tolerant (HT) crops were also detected.

The same Bt toxin as detected by the researchers is present in Mon810 maize, which has EU cultivation approval but is currently banned in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Luxemburg and Greece.

The results show that the toxic Bt protein Cry1Ab was present in blood serum from all three sources (93% of pregnant women, 80% in umbilical blood and 67% of non-pregnant women). The researchers suggest that the most probable source of the toxin is GM food consumed as part of a normal diet in Canada, where GM presence in food is unlabelled. The Canadian scientists have not speculated on any health effects from the presence of Cry1Ab protein as this was beyond the scope of their study.

Safety concerns have been growing since the introduction of GM herbicide tolerant crops, including links to Parkinson’s disease and cancer in the case of glyphosate. Residues of these herbicides in food are infrequently monitored, and the maximum permitted residue levels for crops directly sprayed with glyphosate, such as GM HT crops, were raised over 200 times in the 1990s.

One of two GM crops approved for cultivation in the EU is genetically modified to produce the Cry1Ab toxin – the Bt maize Mon810 licensed to Monsanto and mainly grown in Spain. The other GM crop authorised for cultivation in the EU is the GM potato Amflora (grown on a very limited scale, 17 hectares in two countries in 2011), genetically modified to produce a starch used for non-food industries (not Bt toxin production), but the pulp would be fed to livestock in the food chain.

I always remember the tobacco industry’s comments regarding lung cancer that “doubt is our product”, the same applies to the GM industry, just ask yourself the question “why is it that no insurance company will insure GM?”

WATER – THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR IT

The 'River' Charante, France, August 2010.

As I write this I am looking out on our field that has received little rain over the past two months. I am in South east England where in April less than 10% of normal rainfall was recorded; it was the second successive very dry month here. Provisionally, it was the 6th driest April over England in a series from 1910, a sunny month across all of the UK, with amounts generally close to 150% of normal, making it the sunniest April in the series from 1929. Even in normal times, London actually receives less rainfall than Istanbul, but in April even that lower figure was exceeded.

Our field shed has solar panel powered lighting, as there is a substitute for mains electricity. In my garage I am working on a solar electric vehicle, as there is a substitute for oil; but there is no substitute for water...

Agriculture accounts for 70% of global water use, and farmers around the world are the first to suffer from lack of access to a usable long-term reliable supply. The 2010 Russian Drought caused an export ban on Russian wheat, while elsewhere in the world, floods caused crop destruction. China experienced droughts in some areas and floods in others, as did Australia. The May 2010 Tennessee floods were a 1000 year event. There was flooding in Central Europe, Pakistan, France, and Singapore, far too much water in some areas and nowhere near enough in others. Crops were wiped out by drought and crops were wiped out by flooding, and in response 2010/2011food prices rose and the worlds poorest suffered.

This is a problem now and not for the coming years, the world will run out of accessible water for agriculture long before the world will run out of oil. Unilever CEO Paul Polman was reported as saying that his company is concerned that the regions that produce its tomatoes, Greece, Spain and California “will have enough water in the coming decade to guarantee the harvest that will meet our business needs”.

Water is a marginal consideration to many Western governments; but very soon it will be a central issue, without water there is no life.

Jesus mentioned water often, 'living water' is fresh water, and Jesus was never without water. There is a lesson there for as all as we seemingly can only look on as the drought effected areas of the world get ever bigger, more and more are forced to leave their homes in search of life giving living water.