Peter Smith

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Give a man a fish and he eats for a day

Meam · Politics, Land & the Common Good Economic Justice The Silver Bullet They Don't Want You to Find Every generation is handed the same puzzle. Every generation is handed the same solution. And every generation watches its politicians bury it. Meam · In conversation with Fred Harrison's The Silver Bullet (2008) Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and his landlord raises the rent, forcing him to fish until the river runs dry. You've heard the first part of that proverb at every development conference and aid summit since the invention of PowerPoint. Nobody reads it to the end. Fred Harrison spent a career reading it to the end. His 2008 book The Silver Bullet , published by the International Union for Land Value Taxation, makes a simple, uncomfortable argument: humanity already has the solution to poverty, inequality and environmental destruction. We have had it for over a century. We refuse to use it. This i...

The Story of Fred Harrison

Fred Harrison was born in Cyprus in 1944, the son of a British serviceman whose postings would carry the family across the remnants of empire. Germany in the years after World War II. Singapore in the 1950s. Shropshire eventually, his father’s service finally stopped. It was a childhood without roots, and for that very reason, one that produced a man of unusually broad cultural roots. Harrison has described his upbringing as both fortunate and unsettling. Never in any school for more than a year or two, never long enough in any one town to belong to it, he absorbed instead what a child rooted in a single place could never absorb: the sheer variety of the world, its different topographies and rhythms, and underneath all of it, the quiet persistence of the same human conditions. People working, people struggling, poverty sitting alongside plenty. In India, passing through on transit, he could feel it in the streets. In Malaysia and Singapore, he could see it. He did not yet have t...

The thoughts behind the Renegade Ecologist

From my 30 years as a nature conservationist I have learned the utter futility of trying to protect nature under our current economic system. But by making some small changes to our taxation system we could make a world fit for our children to inherit full of wildlife & prosperity for all.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root....
Henry David Thoreau

"In many ways, nature conservation has become just another method of rent extraction by landowners who are trying to hide the fact that modern farmers’ fields are essentially deserts, devoid of wildlife, and the taxpayer must pay ‘rent’ if we want wild animals to occupy ‘their land’."

Peter Smith

Land Value Tax, which is in my opinion the Holy Grail of legislative changes to protect wildlife, is the simplest expression of the Economic theories of Henry George. This theory goes that if we abolish all harmful taxes on our hard work and trade and instead charge a rent for the use of natural resources such as Land we will not waste them or allow private interests to exploit the rest of humanities access to them.

Such a tax would not only stimulate jobs and enterprise but put a value on all of our natural resources and force us to look after them. If it was implemented for agricultural land, where the lower value of perpetually designated wilderness or natural grazing land is reflected in its land value taxation, it would be the surest way to save the wildlife of the UK and for the least cost to the taxpayer”

This would mean hard to farm areas, steep banks, riverbanks, rocky outcrops and areas landowners want to designate a nature reserves, which must be legally binding, could be set aside for wildlife and as such attract no taxation. The result of this would be that unproductive and marginal land would become wildlife havens and receive long term protection for future generation to enjoy. But it would also take away land and monopolies from our plutocrats who own wealth with no obligation to the rest of society, these plutocrats fund both the red and blue (and Yellow) faction of the vested interest or ‘line my friends pocket’ parties that control the legislature in Britain.

This blog is dedicated to teaching those who love nature that there is a simple ‘magic bullet’ that can save the rare wildlife of this country at no cost to the taxpayer. This magic bullet will actually grow our economy and create jobs and help create a better society based on rewarding those who work hard while penalising idol people who make monopolies such as bankers and landowners.

The solution if adopted worldwide would alleviate poverty and starvation and make a significant contribution to preventing war and terrorism.

Follow me on twitter: @peetasmith

Views are my own and don’t reflect the views of Wildwood Trust