Peter Smith

I have just finished ordering my son's Christmas presents. The radio-controlled helicopter, built in China, will make him very happy. But what will it cost the planet? Christmas has become a feast of needless consumption, a fair picture of how quickly and carelessly we are using up the world's natural resources. So how do we stop it? How can I, and everyone else, choose to value something sustainable over a gadget that swallowed so much of the earth in its making? The answer, I believe, lies in equality and secure future income. Where people can count on a decent living, families tend to be smaller and the pressure on resources eases. Henry George understood this in the 1870s. Having studied the evidence, he concluded that the Malthusian doctrine was fundamentally flawed, and that the rich often leaned on it to excuse poverty, as though nothing could be done about it. Economists since have only confirmed how crude that reading of Malthus really is. More on Malthus: htt...

This interview shows the launch of the important new Film Directed by Carlo Nero and produced in conjunction with the Team behind Geophilos. The event was hosted by Oscar Winner Vanessa Redgrave, and was attended by a number of Hollywood stars and leaders of Nature Conservation Charities. The Film explores the relationship between Wildlife, Land, taxation and Law. The film Documents how the introduction of Land Value Tax would give Value to Wildlife and ensure Its protection. The film is presented by Economist Fred Harrison and features Peter Smith CEO and Founder of the Wildwood Trust, Dr Duncan Pickard, Landowner and Farmer, and Polly Higgins, Environmental barrister, author & campaigner.

From the New York Times  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opinion/sunday/heres-the-guy-who-invented-populism.html?_r=1&src=tp&smid=fb-share In 1879, George finished a draft of his most important book. “Discovery upon discovery, and invention after invention, have neither lessened the toil of those who most need respite, nor brought plenty to the poor,” George wrote. He thought the solution was to abolish all taxes on labor and instead impose a single tax, on land. He sent the manuscript to New York. When no one would publish it, he set the type himself and begged publishers simply to ink his plates. The book, “Progress and Poverty,” sold three million copies. George was neither a socialist nor a communist; he influenced Tolstoy but he disagreed with Marx. He saw himself as defending “the Republicanism of Jefferson and the Democracy of Jackson.” He had a bit of Melville in him (the sailor) and some of Thoreau (“We do not ride on the railroad,” Thoreau wrote from ...

Someone told me that poverty exists as wages are too low to pay for rents and house prices are too high. This chap was right, but did not understand the connection between wages, rents and house prices. Once you understand Ricardo's Law then everything else in economics makes sense: A recent history of why rents and house prices are always too high: ·          Since the 50’s the euro-dollar and offshore banking system has been able to magic up endless credit to any western financial player or developer free of tax and regulation. This is the key economic change along with the abandonment of post war controls on the movement of capital ·          Political changes since the thatcher/Reagan era, which were facilitated by my point above, and the triumph of the ‘neo-classical' economic cover story paraded by the dangerous buffoons from the ‘Chicago school’ of economic policy have effectively hidde...

My response to a chap helping to  organised  a anti development petition Any house building would help poor people, it is a national disgrace that we are building so few homes in the UK. But as you say there are no real planning proposals to redress this, and the Tory planning changes are a travesty that will maximise income to landowners and city spivs while minimising the social benefit that home building brings. I still doubt it will have any real structural difference to biodiversity in the UK, changes in agriculture are at least 100 times more important than house building. I still think that this is not well understood by the general population and most people operate on a completely false set of assumptions that house building is a major factor in wildlife loss. Simplistic campaigns and some of the  rhetoric on the 38 degrees site play into this popular misconception. I have grave concerns that the popularity whipped up by all sections of the media ar...

A lot of wildlife charities are mobilising their supporters to sign petitions against the new Tory plans to relax planning permissions on new developments. These new proposal are obviously just political payback to   David Cameron's Landowning Chums in the Countryside Landowners Association and house building political donors. But I have a big problem with wildlife organisations getting on the anti-house building NIMBY bandwagon as the issue is far more complex and we end being part of a system that is responsible for horrendous squalor and social inequality. It is a terrible thing to pit the many people paying large rents, or have taken out mortgages they cannot repay or the many families living in appalling squalor against those of us trying to save wildlife. The reality is that there could be a massive house building programme in the UK, which would have very little direct impact on wildlife. With the right mitigations measures,   such as the construction of wildl...

I wrote this as a d iscussion  for the Lib Dems ALTER group for  their  next party conference - Power to the elbows! LVT Wildlife & The Environment Land Value Tax (LVT) on all land in the UK will not only create jobs and boost the economy, but is the key to protecting our wildlife and conservation of natural resources. LVT will allow all the citizens of the United Kingdom to share in the natural riches of our country and feel that they have a stake in its future. This will have many benefits for community cohesion and respect for the countryside and private property. LVT has been recognised as the key economic reform by the academic discipline of ‘Environmental Economics’ as the only policy that will allow us to square the circle of having a growing economy, increasing employment with greater wildlife protection and conservation of natural resources. Natural Capital Government revenue should come from Natural Capital; the free gifts that nature gives...

I had an e-mail exchange with a David  Cameron  apologist in a discussion about the role Wildlife conservation has in preventing riots,  my response to the Bullingdon  Club  apologist (who had the temerity to say that the poor and  underclass  relied on these people to create wealth)  is copied below, : The members of the Bullingdon club represent mostly landowners who derive their wealth by charging others a rent for land usage. The banking system, which many of the young Landowners find themselves working for these days works on a similar system of charging ‘economic rent’ by the private ownership of the supply of money, where only a tiny fraction is actually put into the productive economy and most goes into third world exploitation and the creation of massive asset bubbles, such as the frightening housing bubble that is crippling the economy of this country. Our Bullingdon Club friends create virtually no wealth, so do no...

The riots and its causes are of course complex, but underneath the many social and individual issues lies a simple, yet subtle, economic truth. Because our economic system has no capacity to value our marginalised youth in the same fashion it has no method of valuing  nature and our natural assets except in a way that exploits them for private advantage of the privileged few. In my view the problem is natural assets, namely access to land, natural resources and intellectual assets that are the essential bedrock of income creation and economic success for any young man or woman. We live in a society that has created an economic and legal system that allows a very few (mostly old people), both in this country and abroad, to own all the natural assets that people need. This system has subtly evolved over many years and been adopted across the world as it benefits those with the greatest power to effect legal and economic change, while at the same time being complex enough to obf...

What a wonderful chap - so much wisdom that ties in with the best scientific knowledge on the matter (deliberately forgotten or suppressed by our industrial farming lobby and DEFRA)

The badger debate has been around for a very long time, over 40 years, but behind the simplistic headlines that badger lovers and farmers are at loggerheads is a much more complex and subtle story, a story full of intrigue and vested interests competing for economic advantage. A whole generation of farmers and ‘country people’ have grown up being told badgers are the main problem, but have forgotten the basic epidemiological science of bovine tuberculosis (bTB). The farming lobby have found it much easier to blame badgers than address the fundamental problems of cattle farming and the poor practices that have led to the epidemic of bTB in the British cattle herd.” A History of Cattle TB. bTB was a dangerous disease and could infect people, mostly  through drinking milk. The introduction of pasteurisation effectively stopped the disease being transferred to humans. Over this time strict controls on cattle movements and herd quarantine ensured a reduction in bTB across the ...

Good comparison! Crucial thing is to get across idea that it's capitalism - wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few who get their welkath and power not buy woirking for it but just because they own the land and the other 'means of production' - that causes trouble, not the market economy in itself. The defenders of capitalism have been pushing the idea that the two are the same thing, but capitalism is a parasitic form of market economy.  Rowan – you hit the nail on the head – Monopoly and the private extraction of a ‘fee’ for the use of mother nature’s bounty lies at the heart of our economic (and environmental) problems. Our Government must collect the ‘economic rents’ of the earth’s gifts to man and not allow it to fall into private hands for free. The free market of our economy is like natural selection, it cannot be stopped and it is foolish to try and work against it, we must work with it and help its processes and value its richness. When we try to co...

One thing evolutionary theory has to teach us of human ecology  is we are expanding Man’s ecological niche and any  occupier of the niches we expand into will be wiped out – hence our need to wipe out badgers… (see recent Government announcement to allow farmers to wipe out badgers in the South West of the UK) It is in our nature to focus on competition and eliminate it. This is as true in human economics as it is in human ecology –modern 'neo-classical' free market economics is about the ability of the few to eliminate all competition and allow monopoly of trade and monopoly of ownership without taxation or any legal influence of other humans or other species.  Politicians are nobbled, laws bent and taxes dodged by the few so they can control more of the economy and reduced its ownership and ‘trophic levels’ as human ecology encompasses more of the trophic levels of the ecology of the planet. As the neo-classicist monopolists expand so there will be...

It is impossible to value nature, it is too complex. Therefore the only practical way to value nature is to charge those who use it, and abuse it, an annual rent. This rent is to paid to the government in lieu of other taxes and will make natural resource destruction expensive and people will naturally seek to reduce their use of land and natural resources, so they can avoid the rental charge. It must be stressed that this tax is instead of other taxes, and total tax take would remain the same. It would be also much more progressive in that the poor would pay less and tax dodgers could not avoid it! Nature’s value to man is endless and should belong to every human in equal measure. The best way to express this is to charge a  tax equal to the rent a landowner would charge for the use of their land or the fee to extract minerals etc. There are other natural rents that could be charged such as water extraction and use of electromagnetic spectrum. This income would then form the bas...

There has been a lot of debate this week stimulated by the publication of the   National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA)  http://uknea.unep-wcmc.org/ This is an interesting publication and something ‘green’ economist have been wrestling with for years. The value of something is very complicated and in our ‘neo classical economic’ consensus, the standard economic argument of today is something is worth what  someone else will pay for it. Why the NEA is wrong and will never be practical It is virtually impossible when it comes to nature and ecological processes to put a value on something. So many people have vastly different values they associate with it and the modern system of regulation and taxation finds it very hard to deal with complex economic externalities from the loss of natural processes of any form. The mechanisms to construct a system of valuation and payment for those valuation would be doomed to failure, except as a dry exercise for purely academic purposes. ...