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L.A. contractors razed a native plant garden for kids. What happens now?

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Friday, August 9, 2024

For more than a decade, visitors say the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park was a shady showcase for indigenous plants, with dense stands of mature native trees and shrubs lining the paths of the grounds just west of Grace E. Simon Lodge and creating a cool, restful places to walk, play and learn. Then, in late June, all that lush undergrowth was leveled by a contractor hired by Los Angeles’ Department of Recreation and Parks to conform with the Los Angeles Fire Department’s brush clearance requirements. Since then, finger pointing and cries of “Ecocide” have reverberated on social media and during city meetings.“It was a magical environment,” said Shari Lee, a nearby resident who’s been walking the site for years. “Now it just seems sort of ... blank.” The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park after the brush clearance. (Shari Lee) These heated exchanges are all part of an ongoing and often contentious discussion about how a city like Los Angeles should manage urban wild lands with native plants. No one questions the need to remove such fast-growing invasives as black mustard, which becomes kindling for wildfires once it dries out in the summer. But should green native shrubs like toyons and lemonade berry be treated the same way? Native plant enthusiasts say those plants control erosion, provide shade and habitat for wildlife and pose little fire danger. Newsletter Sign up for our L.A. Times Plants newsletter At the start of each month, get a roundup of upcoming plant-related activities and events in Southern California, along with links to tips and articles you may have missed. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. Critics say that before the work was done, the city should have notified stakeholders, such as the Northeast LA Forest School, which pays to use the Children’s Garden (also known as the Children’s Arboretum) year round for outdoor instruction. They also believe there should have been an environmental evaluation of the site before Mariposa Landscapes Inc. of Irwindale did the work. The trees and shrubs had been planted more than a decade earlier by the urban forestry nonprofit North East Trees, a project that included signage to identify the many native species added to the site, such as California buckeye, California black walnut and oaks. The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on a rainy day in February, 2024 (top) and after the brush clearance on June 27, 2024. (Becca Hackett-Levy) Today, the area looks denuded. The remaining trees have been trimmed so their limbs are at least 6 feet above the ground per fire prevention rules, some of the plant identification markers have been upturned and the dry, loose soil is covered with leaf debris.Both Mariposa and North East Trees contract with the city on other projects. Neither was willing to be interviewed for this story.The brush clearing was required by the Los Angeles Fire Department to protect a metal shed where the parks department stores fuel for lawn mowers, said Leon Boroditsky, principal ground maintenance supervisor for the forestry division of Recreation and Parks. The fire department did not respond to interview requests. Boroditsky didn’t order the clearing; he was away when the project was contracted. He said that he didn’t know how long the shed had been at the site but that this appeared to be the first year the LAFD felt the building needed to be considered a structure under the brush-clearing rules. The city is also trying to find out how and why North East Trees installed the native plant garden at the park in the first place. It happened about 20 years ago, said Rose Watson, public information director for Recreation and Parks, but the department can’t find any documents outlining the project or what plants were added to the site. There are lots of unanswered questions, Boroditsky said, and the clearance has created so much uproar that the city plans to bring in an independent third-party “arboreal expert” to do their own evaluation. “There have been a lot of knee-jerk reactions and inflammatory rhetoric happening,” Boroditsky said. The city doesn’t even have photos of what the area looked like before the clearing, he added, “which is why I’m saying they don’t have evidence to make some of those claims.”The site is in what the fire department classifies as a very high fire hazard severity zone,” Boroditsky said, and the rules for clearance in such spots are strict. For instance, in “areas within 200 feet of structures and/or 10 feet of roadside surfaces or combustible fence: Grass shall be cut to 3 inches in height. Native brush shall be reduced in quantity to three inches in height. This does not apply to individual native shrubs spaced a minimum of 18 feet apart, provided such shrubs are trimmed up from the ground to 1/3 of their height with all dead material being removed ....” Volunteers located tiny native plants like this toyon that survived the brush clearing, wrapping them in shade cloth to protect them from the scorching sun. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) So basically, the city paid $12,500 for brush clearance to protect a metal storage shed. Critics question whether it would have been simpler and cheaper to just move the shed, say to the adjacent Grace E. Simon Lodge enclosure? “That’s really not something I can clarify now,” Boroditsky said. “That’s something we’re evaluating now.”Becca Hackett-Levy, director of the Northeast LA Forest School, said the shed was at the Children’s Garden before she began using the location nearly eight years ago. She added that she was on maternity leave after the birth of her second child when she got panicked calls from parents saying the space she had paid the city to use for her year-round outdoor classroom had been devastated. A storage shed at the edge of the Children’s Garden in Elysian Park reportedly triggered the brush clearance around the site. The Grace E. Simon Lodge is behind the fence to the left. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) After weeks of uncertainty, Hackett-Levy said she got a call from parks officials Tuesday who told her that they’d found some areas she might be able to use nearby. “They found some good spots in the area, and they’re even changing their mowing schedule to accommodate the school,” she said Wednesday. “I’m just so thankful and shocked, frankly.” The other concerns won’t be so easily resolved. The Elysian Park Children’s Garden on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush clearance. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) Native plant supporters mobilized within hours of the clearing to locate and try to protect surviving baby native shrubs, dotting the area with small red and yellow flags to indicate their locations. Without shelter from the larger shrubs, they were vulnerable during the severe heat, said Brenda Contreras, director of the native plant and wildlife support group Coyotl wan Macehualli. So volunteers wrapped many of the plants in chicken wire and shade cloth for protection and carried in water to irrigate the survivors.Elizabeth Birkenbuel, who lives above the site on Park Drive, was so distressed by volunteers lugging large containers of water on the slippery hill that she encouraged them to hook up hoses to her outdoor faucet so they could more easily fill their buckets. The city typically does brush clearance in the area to remove invasive and highly flammable black mustard and castor bean plants, Birkenbuel said, “but it was really aggressively cleared this time, in a way I’ve never seen it done before. I was very shocked. I usually end my walks there in the summer because it was very shaded, lush and cool, but it’s vastly different now.” The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park, before the clearance of plants. (Shari Lee) Birkenbuel said she can’t afford to keep sharing her water; she’s hoping the city will provide an alternative source. That’s another thing Recreation and Parks is researching right now, Boroditsky said, along with why stakeholders weren’t given advance notice about the work, per usual, and whether the department needs to change its protocols for when it requires environmental review of a site before brush clearance can occur. However, native plant advocates are still going to city meetings and onto social media to accuse the city of deception and “ecocide” by killing protected plants like California black walnut. Boroditsky, a certified arborist, said the site still has lots of native trees, like buckeyes, walnut and oaks, that may have been trimmed to conform to clearance rules but that were not removed. “There is no evidence that protected trees were removed,” he said. Although he added that that’s partly because he didn’t have any photographs of the site before the clearance to confirm what plants were no longer there. He accused community activists of guerrilla gardening in the area by planting more native plants before the city had time to assess what happened and what needed to change. Adding more plants before the city has a plan is a problem, he said, because similar brush clearing might have to be repeated in the future. The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush was cleared. (Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times) However, Contreras and Flink say no one is putting new plants into the ground, especially in the heat of summer, when they would have little chance of surviving. All they’re doing, Contreras said, is trying to identify the plants that survived the clearance and keep them alive until the rains come this winter, which, they worry, could result in problematic erosion in that stripped area. Meanwhile, Mason Flink and Max Kanter, co-founders of Garden City LA, are trying to build awareness of land management at the park by leading free, hour-long tours on the West Loop Trail from Aug. 10 through Sept. 1 to demonstrate the ways public lands can be managed and how the public can get involved. The tour includes the cleared Children’s Garden and the thriving native plant Test Plot gardens they help tend near the Marian Harlow Grove. Preschoolers from the Northeast LA Forest School race up a path last fall toward the native shrubs in the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park. (Becca Hackett-Levy) “Before they cleared out all the native plants, our point of going through the Children’s Garden was to show how all this life was flourishing,” Flink said. “Now it will offer a stark visual contrast to the Test Plot native plant gardens to spark conversations among the participants.” Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose district includes that part of Elysian Park, has taken the role of mediator and hopes to bring everyone together to discuss what happened and how to avoid problems going forward. The city “made a big mistake in not communicating with the community groups” who frequent that space, Soto-Martinez said in an interview. But Recreation and Parks “gave the correct instruction for the brush clearance,” he added, “because we don’t want a brush fire in that area with so many homes nearby.” As for the storage shed that apparently triggered the $12,500 upset: “That’s one of the first things we thought about ... couldn’t we have just moved it?” Soto-Martinez said. “I think that’s a very simple question to ask and a fair thing to keep asking.”

Los Angeles paid $12,500 to raze a native plant garden in Elysian Park to protect a metal storage shed from fire. Critics ask: Why and what now?

For more than a decade, visitors say the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park was a shady showcase for indigenous plants, with dense stands of mature native trees and shrubs lining the paths of the grounds just west of Grace E. Simon Lodge and creating a cool, restful places to walk, play and learn.

Then, in late June, all that lush undergrowth was leveled by a contractor hired by Los Angeles’ Department of Recreation and Parks to conform with the Los Angeles Fire Department’s brush clearance requirements. Since then, finger pointing and cries of “Ecocide” have reverberated on social media and during city meetings.

“It was a magical environment,” said Shari Lee, a nearby resident who’s been walking the site for years. “Now it just seems sort of ... blank.”

The Children's Garden in Elysian Park after the brush clearance.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park after the brush clearance.

(Shari Lee)

These heated exchanges are all part of an ongoing and often contentious discussion about how a city like Los Angeles should manage urban wild lands with native plants. No one questions the need to remove such fast-growing invasives as black mustard, which becomes kindling for wildfires once it dries out in the summer.

But should green native shrubs like toyons and lemonade berry be treated the same way? Native plant enthusiasts say those plants control erosion, provide shade and habitat for wildlife and pose little fire danger.

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At the start of each month, get a roundup of upcoming plant-related activities and events in Southern California, along with links to tips and articles you may have missed.

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Critics say that before the work was done, the city should have notified stakeholders, such as the Northeast LA Forest School, which pays to use the Children’s Garden (also known as the Children’s Arboretum) year round for outdoor instruction. They also believe there should have been an environmental evaluation of the site before Mariposa Landscapes Inc. of Irwindale did the work.

The trees and shrubs had been planted more than a decade earlier by the urban forestry nonprofit North East Trees, a project that included signage to identify the many native species added to the site, such as California buckeye, California black walnut and oaks.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on a rainy day in February, 2024 (top) and after the brush clearance on June 27, 2024. (Becca Hackett-Levy)

Today, the area looks denuded. The remaining trees have been trimmed so their limbs are at least 6 feet above the ground per fire prevention rules, some of the plant identification markers have been upturned and the dry, loose soil is covered with leaf debris.

Both Mariposa and North East Trees contract with the city on other projects. Neither was willing to be interviewed for this story.

The brush clearing was required by the Los Angeles Fire Department to protect a metal shed where the parks department stores fuel for lawn mowers, said Leon Boroditsky, principal ground maintenance supervisor for the forestry division of Recreation and Parks. The fire department did not respond to interview requests.

Boroditsky didn’t order the clearing; he was away when the project was contracted. He said that he didn’t know how long the shed had been at the site but that this appeared to be the first year the LAFD felt the building needed to be considered a structure under the brush-clearing rules.

The city is also trying to find out how and why North East Trees installed the native plant garden at the park in the first place. It happened about 20 years ago, said Rose Watson, public information director for Recreation and Parks, but the department can’t find any documents outlining the project or what plants were added to the site.

There are lots of unanswered questions, Boroditsky said, and the clearance has created so much uproar that the city plans to bring in an independent third-party “arboreal expert” to do their own evaluation.

“There have been a lot of knee-jerk reactions and inflammatory rhetoric happening,” Boroditsky said. The city doesn’t even have photos of what the area looked like before the clearing, he added, “which is why I’m saying they don’t have evidence to make some of those claims.”

The site is in what the fire department classifies as a very high fire hazard severity zone,” Boroditsky said, and the rules for clearance in such spots are strict. For instance, in “areas within 200 feet of structures and/or 10 feet of roadside surfaces or combustible fence: Grass shall be cut to 3 inches in height. Native brush shall be reduced in quantity to three inches in height. This does not apply to individual native shrubs spaced a minimum of 18 feet apart, provided such shrubs are trimmed up from the ground to 1/3 of their height with all dead material being removed ....”

A tiny green plant surrounded with shade cloth and chicken wire for protection.

Volunteers located tiny native plants like this toyon that survived the brush clearing, wrapping them in shade cloth to protect them from the scorching sun.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

So basically, the city paid $12,500 for brush clearance to protect a metal storage shed. Critics question whether it would have been simpler and cheaper to just move the shed, say to the adjacent Grace E. Simon Lodge enclosure? “That’s really not something I can clarify now,” Boroditsky said. “That’s something we’re evaluating now.”

Becca Hackett-Levy, director of the Northeast LA Forest School, said the shed was at the Children’s Garden before she began using the location nearly eight years ago. She added that she was on maternity leave after the birth of her second child when she got panicked calls from parents saying the space she had paid the city to use for her year-round outdoor classroom had been devastated.

A metal storage shed barely visible at the edge of the Children's Garden in Elysian Park.

A storage shed at the edge of the Children’s Garden in Elysian Park reportedly triggered the brush clearance around the site. The Grace E. Simon Lodge is behind the fence to the left.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

After weeks of uncertainty, Hackett-Levy said she got a call from parks officials Tuesday who told her that they’d found some areas she might be able to use nearby. “They found some good spots in the area, and they’re even changing their mowing schedule to accommodate the school,” she said Wednesday. “I’m just so thankful and shocked, frankly.”

The other concerns won’t be so easily resolved.

An open space with sparse trees and dirt that was once the Children's Garden.

The Elysian Park Children’s Garden on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush clearance.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

Native plant supporters mobilized within hours of the clearing to locate and try to protect surviving baby native shrubs, dotting the area with small red and yellow flags to indicate their locations. Without shelter from the larger shrubs, they were vulnerable during the severe heat, said Brenda Contreras, director of the native plant and wildlife support group Coyotl wan Macehualli. So volunteers wrapped many of the plants in chicken wire and shade cloth for protection and carried in water to irrigate the survivors.

Elizabeth Birkenbuel, who lives above the site on Park Drive, was so distressed by volunteers lugging large containers of water on the slippery hill that she encouraged them to hook up hoses to her outdoor faucet so they could more easily fill their buckets.

The city typically does brush clearance in the area to remove invasive and highly flammable black mustard and castor bean plants, Birkenbuel said, “but it was really aggressively cleared this time, in a way I’ve never seen it done before. I was very shocked. I usually end my walks there in the summer because it was very shaded, lush and cool, but it’s vastly different now.”

Trees and brush shade the Children's Garden.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park, before the clearance of plants.

(Shari Lee)

Birkenbuel said she can’t afford to keep sharing her water; she’s hoping the city will provide an alternative source. That’s another thing Recreation and Parks is researching right now, Boroditsky said, along with why stakeholders weren’t given advance notice about the work, per usual, and whether the department needs to change its protocols for when it requires environmental review of a site before brush clearance can occur.

However, native plant advocates are still going to city meetings and onto social media to accuse the city of deception and “ecocide” by killing protected plants like California black walnut.

Boroditsky, a certified arborist, said the site still has lots of native trees, like buckeyes, walnut and oaks, that may have been trimmed to conform to clearance rules but that were not removed. “There is no evidence that protected trees were removed,” he said. Although he added that that’s partly because he didn’t have any photographs of the site before the clearance to confirm what plants were no longer there.

He accused community activists of guerrilla gardening in the area by planting more native plants before the city had time to assess what happened and what needed to change. Adding more plants before the city has a plan is a problem, he said, because similar brush clearing might have to be repeated in the future.

An empty space where the shady garden once stood.

The Children’s Garden in Elysian Park on Aug. 1, about a month after the brush was cleared.

(Jeanette Marantos / Los Angeles Times)

However, Contreras and Flink say no one is putting new plants into the ground, especially in the heat of summer, when they would have little chance of surviving. All they’re doing, Contreras said, is trying to identify the plants that survived the clearance and keep them alive until the rains come this winter, which, they worry, could result in problematic erosion in that stripped area.

Meanwhile, Mason Flink and Max Kanter, co-founders of Garden City LA, are trying to build awareness of land management at the park by leading free, hour-long tours on the West Loop Trail from Aug. 10 through Sept. 1 to demonstrate the ways public lands can be managed and how the public can get involved. The tour includes the cleared Children’s Garden and the thriving native plant Test Plot gardens they help tend near the Marian Harlow Grove.

Three preschoolers racing up a path toward thick shrubs in the Childrens Garden in Elysian Park

Preschoolers from the Northeast LA Forest School race up a path last fall toward the native shrubs in the Children’s Garden at Elysian Park.

(Becca Hackett-Levy)

“Before they cleared out all the native plants, our point of going through the Children’s Garden was to show how all this life was flourishing,” Flink said. “Now it will offer a stark visual contrast to the Test Plot native plant gardens to spark conversations among the participants.”

Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez, whose district includes that part of Elysian Park, has taken the role of mediator and hopes to bring everyone together to discuss what happened and how to avoid problems going forward.

The city “made a big mistake in not communicating with the community groups” who frequent that space, Soto-Martinez said in an interview. But Recreation and Parks “gave the correct instruction for the brush clearance,” he added, “because we don’t want a brush fire in that area with so many homes nearby.”

As for the storage shed that apparently triggered the $12,500 upset: “That’s one of the first things we thought about ... couldn’t we have just moved it?” Soto-Martinez said. “I think that’s a very simple question to ask and a fair thing to keep asking.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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During the Cold War nuclear energy frenzy of the 1970s and ’80s, nuclear supporters — often Republicans — touted the jobs the plants would create, and argued that the United States needed to remain a commanding leader of nuclear technology and weaponry on the global stage.Meanwhile, environmental groups, often aligned with the Democratic Party, opposed nuclear power based on the potential negative impact on surrounding ecosystems, the thorny problem of storing spent fuel and the small but real risk of a nuclear meltdown.“In America … it has been highly politicized,” said Jenifer Avellaneda Diaz, 29, who works in the industry and runs the advocacy account Nuclear Hazelnut. “That is a little bit shameful, because we have great experts here — a lot of doctors, a lot of scientists, a lot of engineers, mathematicians, physicists.”Today, younger Republicans are 11% less likely to support new nuclear plants in the U.S. than their older counterparts. Meanwhile the opposite is true for the left: Younger Democrats are 9% more likely to support new nuclear than older Democrats, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. As a result, while Republicans older than 65 are 27% more likely to support nuclear energy than their Democratic peers, Republicans age 18 to 29 are only 7% more likely to support it than their Democratic counterparts.“Young Democrats and young Republicans may be looking at numbers — but two separate sets of numbers,” said Weisman. “The young Republicans may be looking at the cost per megawatt hour, and the young Democrats are looking at a different number: parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.”Brendan Pittman, 33 — who founded the Berkeley Amend movement, aiming to get his city to drop its “nuclear-free zone” status — said he’s noticed that younger people have become more open to learning about nuclear energy.“Now, as we’re getting into energy crises, and we’re talking more about, ‘How do we solve this?’ Younger people are taking a more rational and nuanced review of all energy, and they’re coming to the same conclusion: Yeah, nuclear checks all the boxes,” Pittman said.“I remember getting signatures on the streets of Berkeley, and I would say most young people — when I said we’re looking to support nuclear energy — they would just stop me and say, ‘Oh you’re supporting nuclear energy? Where do I sign?’” he said. “I didn’t even have to sell it.”This newfound enthusiasm has also affected the nuclear industry, where two dominant age groups have emerged: baby boomers who mostly took nuclear jobs for consistent work, and millennials and Gen Zers who made a motivated choice to enter a stigmatized field, advocates in the industry say.“You get all sorts of different backgrounds, and that really just blooms into all sorts of fresh new ideas, and I think that’s part of what’s making the industry exciting right now,” said Matt Wargon, 33, past chair of the Young Members Group of the American Nuclear Society.Like the workers themselves, the industry has formed two bubbles: the traditional plants that have been operating for decades and a slew of new technologies — from small reactors that could power or heat single factories to a potentially safer class of large-scale reactors that use molten salt in their cores instead of pressurized water.At existing plants, younger folks have injected innovation into longstanding operation norms, improving safety and efficiency. At the startups, those who’ve worked in the industry for decades provide “invaluable” knowledge that simply isn’t in textbooks, industry workers say. Steam rises from the cooling towers of the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, in Waynesboro, Ga. (Mike Stewart / Associated Press) The infusion of new talent and ideas is a significant change from when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 and the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 devastated the industry. Regulations became stricter, and development on new reactors and new technology slowed to a halt.False narratives around the technology ricocheted through society. Both Hoff and Avellaneda Diaz recall their parents worrying about radiation affecting their ability to have children. (The average worker at Diablo receives significantly less radiation in a week than a passenger does on a single East Coast to West Coast airplane flight.)“Radiation is invisible — you can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t hear it,” said Wargon. “And people tend to fear the unknown. … So if you tell them, ‘Oh this power plant has a lot of radiation coming out of it,’ it’s hard to dispel [the misinformation and fear].”Only as the memories faded and new generations entered the workforce did the reputation of nuclear power slowly recover.Advocates also say that college campuses have become a leading space for nuclear advocacy, with Nuclear is Clean Energy (NiCE) clubs popping up at multiple California schools in the past few years.In August, Ivory held up a big “I [heart] nuclear energy,” sign behind an ESPN college football broadcast. It quickly spread on social media and even caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy.Nuclear advocates say the internet and easy access to accurate information has also helped their cause.“That was certainly a revolution because right now, it’s super easy to Google it,” Avellaneda Diaz said. “Back then you needed to go to the library, get the book — it was not that easy to get the information or be informed.”A poll conducted by Ann Bisconti, a scientist and nuclear public opinion expert, found that 74% of people who said they felt very well informed strongly favored the use of nuclear energy in the U.S., whereas only 6% who felt not at all informed supported it.As such, public outreach and education has become a core tenant of the new nuclear advocacy movement.“Let’s be real,” Annala said, “our generation has the whole internet at our fingertips ... so, just starting the conversations is really the big thing.”Advocates speculate that the ability to rapidly disseminate information on nuclear energy to combat misconceptions might have helped prevent nuclear energy from becoming politically and culturally toxic after the Fukushima accident, unlike with Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.While the Texas A&M students were quite young when the disaster unfolded, both Wargon and Pittman were in college in 2011 when an earthquake and tsunami in Japan crippled the power systems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, triggering a meltdown. Avellaneda Diaz was in high school.Hoff was working at Diablo Canyon when Fukushima happened. The public scare, in part pushed by the media, almost led her to quit her job.Instead, after taking the time to analyze the causes of the meltdown and the errors made, she decided to embrace nuclear.For her, Fukushima was a reminder that nuclear power comes with risk — however small — but that even in a worst-case scenario, operators are skilled at preventing a disaster. (PG&E says a Fukushima flooding episode would be impossible at Diablo Canyon.) Environmental activists in Seoul march during a rally marking the 12th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. (Ahn Young-joon / Associated Press) Today, Hoff writes the emergency protocols for Diablo Canyon and hopes the industry will learn again how to engage with the public.She said that’s what happened with her when she first — somewhat reluctantly — took a job at Diablo.“I was a little obnoxious for the first few years,” Hoff said of her constant questioning and search for a critical flaw.Instead of pushing back against her, the plant welcomed it. Newsletter Toward a more sustainable California Get Boiling Point, our newsletter exploring climate change, energy and the environment, and become part of the conversation — and the solution. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

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How British College Students Convinced Authorities That Flying Saucers Were Invading the U.K.

To raise awareness for a charity event, aspiring engineers planted six UFOs across southern England on a single day in 1967

This story was originally published on Narratively, an award-winning storytelling platform that celebrates humanity through the most authentic, unexpected and extraordinary true narratives. To read more from Narratively and support the kind of ad-free, independent media its team is creating, you can subscribe to Narratively here at a 30 percent discount. Neil Batey, a shaggy-haired, 15-year-old paperboy, was on his way to deliver newspapers when he spotted a strange object. It was early on a warm and still Monday morning, September 4, 1967. He had walked across a cricket field from his family’s home in Clevedon, a seaside town in Somerset, in southwest England, on his way to the newsstand to pick up his deliveries. He saw it as he came over Dial Hill, the town’s highest point. “Just off the footpath, in the long grass,” Batey says, “was a large silver flying saucer.” It was a shiny disk, a little over four feet in diameter, with a dome shape on top, and it was emitting a strange mechanical beep. “If I’m perfectly honest, I didn’t know what it was,” Batey says. “But it was definitely flying saucer-shaped.” He hurried down to the newsstand and told the intrigued owner, Robert Seeley, what he had found. The pair sped in Seeley’s Humber convertible up to the hill, where Batey showed him the object. “He said, ‘Oh, my god!’” Batey recalls. “And we both drove back to the paper shop, and he phoned the police.” That same morning, some 30 miles east, at Elm Tree Farm near the country market town of Chippenham, Wiltshire, Mary Puntis (then Mary Jennings) was woken by shouting. A 23-year-old teacher, Puntis was staying with her parents at their farm on the last day of her school’s summer break. “I worked on the farm during the holidays to help out,” Puntis says. “Dad had told me I could have a day off to get ready for school the next day. So I was in bed having a bit of a lie-in. And then Dad came shouting up the stairs: ‘Mary, get up! Get up, quick! Bring your camera! There’s a flying saucer in the field!’” Puntis went downstairs and found her father, Dick Jennings, speaking on the phone with the police. “I think you better get up here,” he was saying. “There’s something in the field. I don’t know what it is. It looks like a flying saucer.” “Oh yes, Mr. Jennings?” Puntis recalls the police dispatcher replying sarcastically. “Are there any little green men?” “Well, I haven’t seen any, but you better get up here,” Dick said. Then he drove back to the field in his tractor. “And I thought, ‘I better go, I suppose,’” Puntis says. So she and her younger brother, Martin, got in her Mini car and followed the tractor up a hedgerow lane to the field. “Halfway up the field, fairly close to the hedge, I could see this silver disk,” Puntis says. She told Martin to wait in the car and trudged in rubber boots through the furrowed field to the object. Unbeknownst to Puntis, it was identical to the one Batey had just found. It was about the same width as Puntis’ Mini and had a perfectly smooth metallic sheen with no visible joins or openings. “The only way you could describe it was that it looked like a flying saucer,” she says. “We were just befuddled.” Chippenham is about 20 miles away from Warminster, the site of Great Britain’s biggest mass UFO sighting. Over a prolonged period in 1965, around 200 witnesses saw unusual objects in the sky and heard strange sounds. Fiery and glowing lights and booming and droning noises were accompanied by mysterious occurrences, including power failures and birds falling from the sky. The phenomenon became known as the “Warminster Thing.” Experts and officials were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation, and the area became regarded as Britain’s epicenter for UFO sightings. Had the “Thing” returned? Two police officers arrived and ordered Puntis and her father to move away from the object. Puntis describes the officers as nervous and cautious. “They wouldn’t go in the field to begin with,” she says. “They peered at it over the hedge.” Then a reporter from the Wiltshire Gazette & Herald arrived, followed by a uniformed flight officer from the nearby Royal Air Force (RAF) Colerne base. Puntis handed the Gazette reporter her camera to take photographs. She says the RAF officer, David Pepper, “got quite brave” and approached the object. With the reluctant police officers, he lifted the heavy disk onto its side and was startled when it began to beep. Pepper told a reporter that he had never seen anything like it. “Eventually,” Puntis says, “the RAF decided they were going to take it away and blow it up.” By this time, the police and the Gazette had received reports suggesting that more of these “flying saucers” had been found across southern England. “I was talking to the Gazette man on the edge of the field,” Puntis says, “and it wasn’t too long before we realized that something big was happening.” The objects found in Clevedon and Chippenham were two of six identical silver disks found on the same morning at equidistant locations along a plumb-straight line that bisected southern England. A map of the locations where the six disks were found Illustration by Julie Benbassat Thirty miles east of Chippenham, in the village of Welford, Berkshire, postal worker Eva Rood found one of the saucers while on her delivery round. Baffled police took it to their station, where officials from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense were called in to investigate, and United States Air Force military police from the local air base arrived to take photos. (The U.S. Air Force has maintained a presence in the U.K. since World War II.) A fourth saucer was found another 30 miles east, at Winkfield, also in Berkshire, near NASA’s only U.K.-based satellite tracking station. One of the station’s engineers, Roger Kenyon, threw pennies at the silver disk to check that it wouldn’t explode. Then he turned it over to the police, who decided that the most appropriate response was to place it in their “lost and found” office. “Well, where else do you put something that comes under the heading of ‘Found’?” a police officer at the scene told the Daily Mirror. Thirty miles east of Winkfield, at Sundridge Park Golf Club in the London borough of Bromley, caddy Harry Huxley found saucer number five. Police bundled the saucer into a van and transported it to their station, where the officers became so annoyed by the constant beeping that they dumped it outside while they waited for Ministry of Defense officials to arrive. The sixth saucer wasn’t found until around lunchtime. This one was another 30 miles away, on vacant land in Rushenden, a village on the Isle of Sheppey, off Kent on England’s east coast—about 150 miles away from the first site at Clevedon. Police cordoned off the area, and the fire brigade scanned the object with a radiation survey meter. Stretched across England’s green fields and rolling hills, the six silver saucers appeared alien and otherworldly—but what were they? Were they from outer space? Were they from the Soviet Union? Were they aircraft or pieces of aircraft? Fallen satellites or unexploded bombs? At Rushenden, a large crowd was gathering, and children were delighted by the arrival of an RAF helicopter that the Ministry of Defense had scrambled from the nearby base at Manston. Creating something of a slapstick spectacle, the RAF crew attempted to lift the unidentified object into the helicopter, but it was too heavy, so they dropped it. When it hit the ground, the saucer split open, spraying the crew with a putrid, gloopy liquid. Back in Clevedon, the police had taken the first saucer, the one Batey had found, away on a roof rack. Batey had changed into his smartest shirt and tie and gone to the police station, where he was photographed with the saucer for newspapers and filmed with it for Pathé News. Two engineers arrived from local precision-tool manufacturer Willcocks to assist the police in identifying the object and figuring out what was inside. Adopting the kind of bumbling carelessness that characterized the overall response to the supposed invasion, they set upon the disk with a hacksaw and then attacked it with a chisel. Eventually, they managed to make a small hole—and also unleashed a foul stench. Unidentified Flying Objects (1967) “A smell as bad as bad eggs came out,” engineer Reg Willard told the Birmingham Post. Inside was the same off-white substance that had sprayed the RAF crew. “I know this sounds silly,” Willard added, “[but] I have read these science fiction stories and wondered if this was an alien attempt to establish life on this planet.” Despite concerns, Willard’s colleague was photographed dipping his fingers into the saucer to taste the substance. A sample was sent to scientists for more detailed analysis. In Chippenham, officials took the saucer found by the Jennings family to a garbage dump. There, experts from a British Army bomb disposal unit attached specially prepared explosives and blew it apart—with little regard for the well-being of any potential alien occupants. Out poured the foul-smelling gloop, described by the Western Daily Press as a “pig-swill-like mixture.” When police and Army personnel inspected the guts of the wreckage, they found a secret compartment. The engineers back at Clevedon, with their hacksaws and chisels, had also discovered the compartment, which contained a wired-together contraption consisting of a loudspeaker, a transistor with a mercury switch and an Exide brand battery. It now seemed unlikely that these UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. As Willard told the Nottingham Guardian Journal, “They are made in Britain—not Mars.” The flying saucer invasion that had flustered and baffled police, military and government officials across Britain was a remarkable hoax. Earlier that morning, around 2 a.m., a group of young men operating in six teams of two or three had fanned out across the breadth of southern England. Each team had a vehicle filled with camping gear. If anyone asked, they planned to say they were setting out to spend the night under the stars. But hidden beneath their gear, each of the six teams had a large silver disk. Under the cover of darkness, they separately placed these disks in six very specific locations. Then, they retreated from the scene and waited for their respective flying saucers to be discovered. The young men were student engineers at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a Ministry of Defense college and research base in Farnborough, Hampshire, right in the heart of southern England. And they were planning to pull off an extraordinary prank—the greatest UFO hoax the world had ever seen. The hoax’s mastermind was Chris Southall, a 22-year-old with a chinstrap beard and half-frame glasses who was just coming to the end of his five-year apprenticeship. “We had to do quite a lot of work in advance to find good sites,” Southall recalls nearly 60 years later. “We looked on maps and went out looking for sites where we wouldn’t be spotted at night, but where people would find them in the morning.” A glance at the chosen locations on a map reveals they were selected with remarkable precision. The idea was that the saucers would be planted at equidistant sites approximately 30 miles apart across southern England, in a straight line just above the 51st parallel, at a latitude of 51.3 degrees north of the equator. This specific formula represented a ley line, a mystical pathway that supposedly connects ancient sites across the earth with an invisible energy trail. Some UFO researchers have posited that ley lines could be navigational markers created by prehistoric civilizations to guide visiting alien spacecraft. Southall was the only member of the group who believed in UFOs, and he reckoned that if aliens did invade, they would carve up the earth with landing spots based on these lines. He saw this as a fun way to test the authorities’ response to an actual invasion. The fact that several of the locations happened to be near secretive Air Force bases, a NASA tracking station and recent UFO “hot spots” only enhanced the caper. “On the night of ‘laying the eggs,’ as we called it, we drove across the country and put them in the spots we’d figured out,” Southall says. The plan worked (almost) perfectly. The saucers were all quickly found and reported to the authorities—except for the sixth saucer, the one Southall had planted himself at Rushenden. Because no one found that disk organically, Southall decided to take matters into his own hands. He phoned the police, telling them he was a schoolboy who’d been out walking his dog when he came across something he thought might be a bomb. Pretty soon, the scene was crawling with police and encircled by a helicopter, and an RAF crew was sprayed with the putrid goopy liquid. Illustration by Julie Benbassat Southall and the others returned to their dorm at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. “And then we just had to wait with bated breath to see what kind of publicity it got,” he recalls. The aim was to promote the students’ Rag Week, an annual British tradition in which university students carry out stunts and pranks to “raise and give” (hence “Rag”) money for charity. At the time, costumed parades, sponsored challenges and eye-catching antics (such as attempting to build the world’s biggest sandcastle) were common, with participants shaking collection tins and buckets for donations around their towns. However, Southall and his friends had previous experience with creating much more ambitious and far-reaching stunts. Two years earlier, in 1965, the young men had dropped a replica of NASA’s Gemini space capsule, complete with parachute, into the River Thames in central London, generating national headlines and official consternation. (“Mystery Capsule Found on Thames Bank,” read one headline. “It could be a hoax,” a police spokesperson told the Daily Mirror, “but we can’t take any chances.”) And in 1966, Southall had designed and built a 7.5-foot-tall mechanical robot named Rodnee, which had embarked on a 30-mile charity walk from Farnborough to the capital. (“Rodnee the Robot Marches on London,” splashed the Daily Mirror, although a later headline revealed a setback: “Rodnee’s Engine Fails at Crucial Moment.”) The UFO stunt was even more audacious. Work began eight months before its execution, in January 1967, in a workshop at the back of the students’ dorm. Southall made a plaster model of a flying saucer and used that to create a mold. Then he used the mold to make 12 fiberglass halves and stuck those together to make six saucers. These were coated with a specially formulated aluminum gel to give them an unearthly polished shine. The saucers cost around £30 to make (equivalent to around £465 or $600 in 2024), paid for out of the college’s Rag Week budget. The disks’ innards were filled with almost 60 pounds of goopy gunk—actually a simple flour and water paste. “When you let it go off, it turns into this rancid jelly,” Southall says. (This is also where the putrid smell arises, either from the mixture being left out for too long or because the flour itself has gone bad.) “The idea was that if they cracked it open, they might think it was a dead alien or something.” Southall and his friends also built the electronics that made the beeping sound designed to help people find the saucers. “It was powered by just a tiny little battery,” he says. “That’s all you needed.” Farmer Dick Jennings looks at the object he found in a field near Chippenham on September 4, 1967. Photo by Tibbles / Daily Mirror / Mirrorpix via Getty Images It didn’t take long for the saucers to land in the media. Evening newspapers and local television bulletins reported the emerging story. Speaking about the saucer that Batey had found in Clevedon, police sergeant John Durston told the Bristol Evening Post, “The object does look just as one imagines a spaceship should look. I have contacted my headquarters, and they are getting in touch with all sorts of people.” He added, “It looks just like a flying saucer,” but cautioned, “There’s always the possibility that someone silly might have put something on Dial Hill to cause a panic.” On Monday evening, around 12 hours after the first saucer was found, a reporter linked the flying saucers to previous Rag Week stunts and called the Royal Aircraft Establishment to ask if those same students were behind the UFO hoax. “We owned up,” Southall says. They had hoped the mystery would last a little longer. But the hoax became the story. “So we got a second day of publicity. And lots of international publicity.” The headline in the local Western Daily Press was “The Big Flying Saucer Hoax.” The Daily Mirror ran a front-page story and center spread featuring photos of Batey and Southall under the headline “How the Saucers Hoax Got off The Ground.” “The Great Invasion From Outer Space was unmasked last night for what it was,” the national newspaper reported, “an amazing hoax by a group of bright young men … a leg pull that started a search for little green men.” Across the Atlantic, the New York Times’ headline was “Aviation Students Hoax Britain With Flotilla of ‘Flying Saucers.’” Half the world away from southern England, Australia’s Canberra Times simply said, “Student Hoax Fools Britain.” Southall and his colleagues were jubilant. They fielded phone calls from reporters, met with photographers and traveled to television stations. “We did it to publicize our Rag Week,” Southall told reporters at the time. “We aim to raise £2,000 for local charities, and this was the best way of drawing attention to it. We also thought we would give the police an exercise in dealing with alien spacecraft, because it could happen one day. We didn’t mean to cause chaos—in fact, we were rather surprised that it caused all this fuss.” The fuss had involved—and embarrassed—the police, the military, the Ministry of Defense and the Royal Aircraft Establishment, as well as numerous officials, engineers and experts. While the students’ previous stunts had generated a lot of local interest, this one had spread around the globe and entwined the highest levels of authority. As Southall’s colleague David Harrison told the Reading Evening Post, “We haven’t received a reprimand from any officialdom yet, but we are half expecting that we will get a bit of a telling off.” There was one response the group hadn’t anticipated. During the press calls, several reporters asked the same surprising question: What did the hoaxers know about a seventh flying saucer that had been found on the same day on a major thoroughfare in central London, less than a mile from both the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace? This mysterious “seventh saucer” looked a little bit like the other six, and police were investigating where it had come from. Southall did not know anything about it and answered honestly: “It was nothing to do with us.” “It was every bit as intriguing as the old TV science fiction thriller ‘The Quatermass Experiment,’ which told of weird, egg-shaped objects full of gas whining down to earth as the spearhead of an invasion from outer space,” wrote the Newcastle Journal following the UFO hoax. “Judging by the coverage in national newspapers,” the Runcorn Weekly News reported, “it was the most successful space stunt of recent times.” UFO researchers were impressed, too. Richard Beet, secretary of the Surrey Investigation Group on Aerial Phenomena, told the Farnborough Chronicle that it was “a very clever hoax,” adding that he wanted to acquire one of the saucers for an exhibition. The newspaper reported that “an American television company has rung up the Rag committee asking to buy one of the ‘spaceships’ to build a show around it.” Still, as Harrison had feared, the Chronicle also said that “officialdom” had taken a “dim view” of the stunt, and police were considering pressing criminal charges. A Somerset Police spokesperson handling the Clevedon case refused to comment to the press about suggestions that the students could be prosecuted but said “those responsible” would likely be interviewed. Wasting police time was a criminal offense, and newspapers reported that the students might also be charged with littering in the countryside and “causing a public mischief.” The investigation of the six saucers had entangled five separate police forces across southern England, including London’s Metropolitan Police, based at Scotland Yard. Perhaps more importantly, the hoax had caused consternation and red faces in the government offices of the Ministry of Defense. “If we’d done it now, we’d have been in jail,” Southall says. He held an emergency meeting with his colleagues at their dorm to discuss the possibility of prosecution. “We were nervous about it,” he recalls, “but it was all so exciting. And, of course, we’d been up all night, and then we were trekking off to television studios and things like that. We were so zonked out that it was hard to get too worried about it, and we were just going with the flow.” In Clevedon, Batey’s saucer was held by police as evidence. “We’re not giving them back their saucer,” said Durston, “not for the moment, anyway.” But Durston said he would be very surprised if the Somerset Police pressed charges. Chief Inspector Frank Dummett of the Wiltshire Police, responsible for investigating the Chippenham saucer, seemed to take the prank with good grace. “It was obviously a very elaborate hoax,” he said, “exceedingly well organized and must have cost a good deal of money to carry out.” In Bromley, a Kent Police spokesman said, “We are taking it like gentlemen,” and there was “no question of prosecution.” But in Welford and Winkfield, the Berkshire Police force was less forgiving, saying it was still considering action against the hoaxers. As for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, the prestigious institution at the center of the caper decided that the students would not face punishment. The institution’s chief engineer, F.H. Beer, said, “I want to say publicly that I thought it was a very fine effort. In spite of the fact that there have been some people who don’t approve, I personally do.” It was the seemingly incompetent response to the hoax that caused the most embarrassment. Another UFO research group, the National Investigation Committee for Aerial Phenomena, wrote to the Ministry of Defense, criticizing a “complete lack of cooperation” among the departments involved in the official response and offering its own services in the future. “One hesitates to think of what might have happened had one or more flying objects actually landed,” the letter said. Declassified files show that the Ministry of Defense regarded the incident as an “(obviously very successful) practical joke.” But the documents also suggest that officials feared the response to the high-profile hoax might reveal secret details about investigations into actual UFOs and potential plans for dealing with a real alien invasion. A letter held at the U.K.’s National Archives shows that the Ministry of Defense wrote to an RAF intelligence officer involved in the Bromley saucer investigation, advising him not to comment to the media about any of the equipment he had used in examining the objects, nor about any of his previous or subsequent “‘UFO’ work.” According to another letter, the officer from Bromley (whose name is redacted) was “responsible for investigating all UFO sightings in U.K. airspace,” suggesting he was a 1960s British version of FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder from “The X-Files.” A restricted staff memo indicates how seriously the U.K. took the incident by stating that the officer should be reminded of his obligations under the Official Secrets Act, U.K. legislation that protects sensitive information, including information related to national security. To the U.K. authorities, this was more than just a joke. In the end, despite—or perhaps because of—the Ministry of Defense’s involvement (and the potential embarrassment of national security secrets being revealed if the case were prolonged), Southall and the other students were not prosecuted and faced no further action. They had, after all, pulled off the stunt for a good cause. Several of the hoaxers also participated in a more traditional Rag Week event—a sponsored walk in “flower power” costumes. Southall, “minus his flying saucers,” according to the Farnborough Chronicle, walked 41 miles. The UFO hoax’s publicity generated extra donations and helped the Rag committee reach its charity fundraising target of £2,000 (equivalent to around £31,000, or nearly $40,000, in 2024). A newspaper article about the hoax Farnborough Chronicle / Courtesy of Paul Brown But that wasn’t the end of the story. Although the flying saucer invasion had been exposed as a hoax, some refused to believe the explanation. In Bromley, a witness named Cynthia Tooth, described in the Newcastle Journal as the wife of an advertising executive, claimed she had seen the saucer found on the golf course fall from the sky in the middle of the night and described “a steady bright light, surmounted by a flashing light.” There were other strange sightings on the day of the hoax, too. In Lower Spanton, near where Puntis and her father found the Chippenham saucer, villagers and schoolchildren reported seeing a silver “flying bubble” in the sky. “It was very large and very high and glinted and shone in the sun,” local Michael Smith told the Western Daily Press. “I never saw anything like it before.” In Bicester, north of where the U.S. Air Force photographed the Welford saucer, a group of motorists stopped their vehicles on a country lane to watch a silver, cigar-shaped object floating in the sky in broad daylight. “I’ve never believed in this sort of thing before,” witness Raymond Richardson told the Reading Evening Post. “But this made me go cold all over.” It’s impossible to know what they saw, but each of these witnesses believed they’d seen something out of the ordinary, most of which could not be traced back to the students’ hoax. And then there was the so-called seventh saucer, found on the same day as the six fake ones, on a traffic island at Kingsway, central London, outside the Rediffusion television studios—in a building that had previously been the administrative headquarters of the RAF. The silver-gray saucer, about three feet across with two protruding antennae, was found by Jack Grant of Wandsworth, who said he didn’t dare touch it. It was taken away in a van by police and seemingly disappeared—with no record of what happened to it. “Probably another hoax,” wrote the Daily Mirror. “But then, you never can tell.” Official records show that 362 “unexplained aerial sightings” were reported to the U.K. Ministry of Defense in 1967, up from 95 in the previous year. Batey and Puntis, now ages 72 and 80 respectively, recall their UFO encounters with—mostly—good humor. Batey’s media appearances led to teasing at school. “I got the piss taken out of me mercilessly by younger kids,” he says. More positively, Batey was contacted by a long-lost cousin in Australia who spotted his photo in a newspaper. He bears no resentment toward the hoaxers. “It was just a bit of fun,” he says. “I was an avid science fiction fan, anyway. It was quite impressive. I would probably have done it if I’d been a bit older. I would have taken part gleefully.” “We thought it was absolutely brilliant,” Puntis says. “Really, really clever. Because they had plotted these six places across the country, and they had gone to an awful lot of trouble to identify sites that were exactly the same distances apart. And one happened to be our field. It was wonderful. It’s been a talking point for, well, 57 years. And people are still talking about it.” Puntis now lives in a house she built in that same field. As for the great UFO hoax’s mastermind, today Southall is an environmental activist who builds eco-friendly geodesic domes rather than flying saucers. “We grow our own food and provide our own heat from wood and solar, and all that kind of stuff,” he says. He got into self-sufficiency right after finishing his engineering apprenticeship. “I lived off-grid on the Isle of Man for 9 years, and after that, I lived in a commune for 20 years, so I’ve had all sorts of adventures through my life.” Southall is still amused when he thinks of the blundering official response to the saucers. “It’s a bit shocking, isn’t it, really?” he reflects. “Because they could have been real, they could have had strange, slimy creatures inside or whatever. They didn’t know when they cracked them open that this slimy stuff was paste. At the time, I was well into science fiction, so I would have liked to have thought they’d take it a little bit more seriously, at least initially.” As for the witness who saw one of the fake saucers fall from the sky and the mysterious seventh saucer that he had no involvement with, Southall can give no explanation other than offering a well-accepted truism: “It’s a funny old world out there, I tell you.” Paul Brown writes about history, true crime and sports. He also pens a newsletter called Singular Discoveries about unusual true stories from forgotten corners of the past. Jesse Sposato is Narratively’s executive editor. She also writes about social issues, feminism, health, friendship and culture for a variety of outlets. She is currently working on a collection of essays about coming of age in the suburbs. Julie Benbassat is an award-winning illustrator, painter and animator. Get the latest History stories in your inbox?

Activism
Cosmos
Culture

Cancel drilling of North Sea oilfield, activists urge Scottish court

Greenpeace and Uplift say Rosebank and Jackdaw licences were granted unlawfully by former Tory governmentClimate campaigners have urged a Scottish court to cancel the licence to drill the UK’s largest untapped oilfield, arguing it will cause “sizeable” and unjustified damage to the planet.Greenpeace and Uplift accuse the former Conservative government of having unlawfully given the Norwegian oil giant Equinor a licence to exploit the Rosebank oilfield, which sits 80 miles (130km) north-west of Shetland and holds nearly 500m barrels of oil and gas. Continue reading...

Climate campaigners have urged a Scottish court to cancel the licence to drill the UK’s largest untapped oilfield, arguing it will cause “sizeable” and unjustified damage to the planet.Greenpeace and Uplift accuse the former Conservative government of having unlawfully given the Norwegian oil giant Equinor a licence to exploit the Rosebank oilfield, which sits 80 miles (130km) north-west of Shetland and holds nearly 500m barrels of oil and gas.Lawyers for both groups told a judge in Edinburgh on Tuesday the government and the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) formerly known as the Oil and Gas Authority, had wrongly failed to take into account the tens of millions of tonnes of CO2 that would be burned when the oil was used, and the impact that would have on the climate.Ruth Crawford KC, the lawyer for Greenpeace, told Lord Ericht that Equinor and its Israeli-owned co-investor Ithaca knew it was unlawful to ignore the climate costs of the project.“There can be no doubt this project will produce substantial amounts of oil and gas [with] a substantial impact on the climate and a substantial impact on environmental and human health,” she said.Their judicial review, being heard in the court of session, Scotland’s top civil court, began as world leaders convened in Azerbaijan for a new round of climate talks, where Keir Starmer confirmed the UK had set a much tougher new target, to cut its carbon emissions by 81% compared with 1990 levels by 2035.Uplift and Greenpeace are asking the court to cancel the drilling licence for Rosebank and also a licence granted to a Shell subsidiary, BG International (BGI) to drill for gas in the Jackdaw field in the North Sea, which they also allege ministers granted unlawfully.They estimate the Rosebank oilfield will release more CO2 than the annual emissions of the world’s 28 poorest countries combined, including Uganda and Mozambique.They believe their challenges were given significant legal weight after the UK supreme court ruled in June that ministers had to take account of the climate impacts from burning the oil and gas extracted by drilling in the UK before issuing licences.Even so, this case could prove to be a significant test of the new Labour government’s pledges to dramatically reduce the UK’s reliance on oil and gas by blocking new drilling licences. After Labour’s general election victory, Ed Miliband, the net zero secretary, decided the UK government would no longer defend the case brought by Greenpeace and Uplift but he still faces a political challenge if they win.If Lord Ericht cancels their drilling licences, Equinor and BGI are likely to reapply for fresh licences to drill both fields, despite the supreme court decision, which followed a legal challenge by the climate campaigner Sarah Finch.BGI is already extracting gas from the Jackdaw field. The companies argue both fields are essential to the UK economy, support thousands of jobs and provide significant tax revenues – arguments that critics of Labour’s climate policy are likely to endorse.Crawford told the court that those political arguments were irrelevant in this case; this case was solely about whether the law was followed.skip past newsletter promotionThe planet's most important stories. Get all the week's environment news - the good, the bad and the essentialPrivacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.after newsletter promotionShe said ministers and the NSTA made the same “substantial error of law” identified by the supreme court in June when they licensed the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields without assessing the climate impacts of the oil and gas they produced.She said Equinor, Ithaca and BGI had spent about £1bn on developing Rosebank and Jackdaw but had miscalculated. They knew it was unlawful to ignore the climate costs of the project, she said, adding: “They lost the bet.”On Tuesday, before the case began, about 160 climate protesters gathered outside the court calling for the licences to be cancelled, chanting “I believe we can win,” while stretching a long red scarf across the entrance to the court.Lauren MacDonald, a coordinator for the Stop Rosebank campaign, told activists on Monday night that winning this case would be crucial for the climate movement.“As truly devastating as many things are in the world right now, in this little corner of the world, we are on the precipice of a massive, massive victory for the climate, and that is precisely because people have stood in the way,” she said.“Every single fossil fuel project that we can stop, every single fraction is a degree of warming that we can stop. It’s countless lives saved, which will always, always be worth it.”

Activism
Climate
Government

Suggested Viewing

Between Clouds and Glass

A look at the monumental problem of bird collisions in Chicago, the deadliest city for birds, just ahead of Houston and Dallas. According to scientists, what happens in Chicago can affect bird populations across North America. As many as one billion birds die each year in the United States due to building collisions, but there are people who care and work hard to change this.

Family
Conservation
Activism

The Whale Guitar: Instrument of Change

Inspired by Herman Melville's epic tale, "Moby-Dick or The Whale", a late-blooming singer/songwriter and former toy designer, Jen Long, acts on a startling vision and commissions the design and build of a remarkable custom electric guitar. It's body is "The Whale" itself as it snags the mad Captain Ahab in the tangled ropes of his own obsession, and prepares to launch a boat of his whalers to their doom. The entire guitar reinterprets Melville's tale as an Anthropocene climate change warning, with the whale representing the seas and storms of climate change arising on this "third day" of late stage capitalism. Hundreds of guitarists, including J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, have played and signed this "Instrument of Change" to amplify the alarm to turn our ship of over-production and over-consumption around while there is still time. As the embroidered strap featuring Starbuck's last words implores: "oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist."

Music
Activism
Climate

The Youth Climate Corps BC

In collaboration with communities across British Columbia, the Youth Climate Corps challenges what resilience looks like through youth led, locally designed, climate action initiatives.

Youth
Activism

The Z-Nail Gang

When a corporate mining giant moves into a small coastal town looking for gold and talking about trickle down wealth some folks just aren't convinced.

Activism
Resources
Fiction

Jetty Cats

Jetty Cats explores contemporary animal rights issues through a focus on a feral cat colony that has survived on a rocky, seaside jetty in Southern California for decades. There is an ongoing debate over feral cat colonies involving advocates who support the trap, neuter, and return -- or "TNR" -- model of management, and those who argue that trapping and euthanizing the cats is more humane. This documentary’s point-of-view supports the TNR model and the related “no-kill” animal shelter policy, and features an exclusive interview with Richard Avanzino, the "Father" of the no-kill movement.

Animals
Government
Activism

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